Category Archives: Genealogy Wiki

Party and Programming

Categories: Accountability, David Tennant, Doctor Who, FFF Database, Genealogy, Genealogy Wiki, UJGS, Web Site Development
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 31 seconds

Went to Rochelle’s 60th birthday party. Alan and Andalin showed up eventually, so there were other people I knew. Had fun anyways.

Still working on my new FFF web site. Should be working for clients. Not prepared to go to the FHL today so will now plan to watch WDYTYA tonight and go downtown on Saturday. Must get some client organizing done for that.

Also, need to get back in touch with John, web site development client. It’s been since early in my cold that I last contacted him. I will need to do a lot of custom programming for his site, and integrating WordPress into it. I need to give him a rough estimate of the time/costs but haven’t even begun to think about that. I hate trying to estimate time; I suck at it.

Must still write a blog entry about the UJGS meeting.

Katie reminded me of Script Frenzy; I’d already gotten an email about it. I can’t think of anything to write except for something about David Tennant. What else is on my mind? But I wouldn’t know what to write. I’m a songwriter; I write vignettes. I can take five seconds of emotions and turn it into a four minute song, but I’m not loaded with complete stories. The NaNoWriMo novels are difficult enough. The only script I could think to write right now would be the Doctor Who episode I’ve been mulling over in my head, but it has no story. I’ve got a new companion and how they meet, lots of other details about her that would be revealed over time, and nothing else. That would make for a short script.

New Site Going Well

Categories: Accountability, FFF Database, Genealogy, Genealogy Wiki, UJGS
Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 50 seconds

Got some research at the FHL for Michael.

Been working on my new FFF site. Got the name indexes and descendent trees automated so I won’t have to draw up those trees anymore. Those looked nice but were a drag to draw. I suppose I could try to automate those, but it’s more work than I want to do just now. I’d rather update the web site. I still have to update the database with a lot of new information for this year and finish the FFF newsletter.

Today is Rochelle’s birthday. I plan to drop in to her party.

I didn’t write up a blog entry for the UJGS meeting Monday night. It was a great success and we’re going to repeat that topic once every year. But it needs to be renamed. I’ve got a while to think of something clever.

Faces of America – Inspiration

Categories: FFF Database, Genealogy, Genealogy on TV, Genealogy Wiki
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 51 seconds

I just watched the third episode of Faces of America on PBS and was inspired. I meant to write a blog entry about the second episode which dealt with immigration and naturalization, two topics I deal with a lot in my research, but instead, this third episode has given me a revelation.

Of course I was interested in the stories of the families who were in America before it was the USA, but the story that hit me the hardest was that Yo-Yo Ma. It was that book, the one that literally fell out of a wall. What genealogist wouldn’t do anything to find a book like that?

He is incredibly lucky to now have such an item in his possession, but the only way most of the rest of us are going to get a book like that is to make it ourselves. We probably won’t be able to go back as far in the lineage, and we certainly won’t have first-hand accounts of anyone who lived more than 100 years ago, but we can take what we know now and begin the book.

It’s the old adage of “publish or perish” that most genealogists have heard time and time again. We need to create the book ourselves so that future generations will have the information to look back on.

Can you imagine how the genealogist of your family in 100 years’ time might feel when they want to know more about their family history and they find the book that you create today?

So I have a new idea in mind for how to go about this. It’s an old project that has had a few starts, but maybe this will be the one that works out and finishes. (Not that genealogy research is ever finished, but the others never came very close.) I want to combine a blog, the coolest features from my genealogy wiki, and hopefully incorporate the genealogy database I already have to create a new web site. I want to entice my relatives to leave their own stories as comments, and be able to reasonably easily publish all of the information in a printed book or PDF. Oh yes, I have a lot of programming to do.

Why Wiki When I Can Program?

Categories: Accountability, Genealogy, Genealogy Wiki, Web Site Development
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 10 seconds

So I installed MediaWiki to give it a try. I spent a long time today reading about how to use it; trying to figure out how to use templates and tables of contents, the latter of which I couldn’t really find in the help files. Finally I settled on just trying it out. I created the navigation menu and headed off to the first page of sources. I figured I’d start with the sources again. And on my very first source, I tried to upload the image into the database, and it told me that it can’t accept “.jpg” files, only “jpg”. Very funny.

So I quickly scrapped the idea of using MediaWiki. There was nothing in the help files for errors like that. At least, there was nothing I could find quickly enough to not abandon the project immediately. I wasted enough time on it.

What I’m going to do instead is revamp my own database to deal with sources better. Instead of linking to web pages that took me too long to put together, I’m going to just keep all the data in the database. I will link the database to the image files directly, which will be kept in a specific folder just for the database.

I started renaming image files only to find that I really need to rescan almost everything. So that will be my project then. I will alter my database to add links directly to the images and provide extracts of the data. At first, I will add this information, but eventually the old links to the web pages will come out entirely. Instead of “uploading” the files into the database, I will just put them into a folder. I may separate the folders by family groups the way I did in TikiWiki just to keep the document folder from becoming overwhelming.

I also installed phpMyAdmin, so altering the database directly will be easier. I’m sure I’ll have to do plenty of that along the way.

And in the end, my own genealogy database will be what I use to create a wiki-like site if I so desire. I didn’t really want my relatives messing with the data anyways and envisioned them — if they did anything at all — just leaving comments or uploading more files. I’m sure I can figure out a comment and file upload system, even if I have to integrate my database into a blog or something.

To Wiki or Not To Wiki, That is the Question

Categories: Genealogy, Genealogy Wiki, Web Site Development
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 5 seconds

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, then you know I just got a new computer. It’s a Windows 7 computer. So along with the new OS, I decided to upgrade all my software. I downloaded the newest or newest stable releases of Apache, PHP, and MySQL, since I do my own web development and my genealogy database is self-programmed using those. I also opted for the latest release of TikiWiki. I had an old release before only because it would run on the old PHP/MySQL versions I had.

Unfortunately, the wiki program seems to have degraded over time. There were fewer themes and the old ones were utterly incompatible, so I had to go with an entirely new look. After not spending enough time on that, I started looking around at my pages. The wiki menus had changed and I didn’t like them. My Hebrew text didn’t survive for some reason. Maybe it was the way the wiki set up the database, but my regular genealogy database Hebrew survived the transfer to the new computer. One of the newest wiki pages I created was a name index with a list of surnames at the top linked to the anchors within the page. Well, the new TikiWiki version entirely erased all those anchors within the page and even when I tried to put them back, it wiped them out again. It has new plugins specifically for anchors and linking within pages, but they don’t seem to work or I couldn’t figure out how they work. The documentation site is usually non-functional, but I was on it briefly and saw nothing to suggest how to use them differently than I was already trying to do.

So that leaves me with the big dilemma. I originally wanted to use MediaWiki because I like the look and feel of Wikipedia. But I was also considering putting this online someday as a private web site and my current web host practically begged me not to use that particular wiki. They had TikiWiki installed and I was able to find an older version that I could install to my local computer. There seems to be a way to convert from one to the other, but it’s in Python, which I don’t have or really want, and it was done using an even older version than I was using, so it might not work at all.

I spent a lot of time on the wiki and was finding the initial results to be very interesting. I hate to abandon the project, or even start over from the beginning again in a new wiki program, but I’m considering it. I’m also considering going back to my original database and working more with that. My GEDCOM export was still riddled with errors and I wanted to fix those. And I wonder if I could write my own wiki-like program based on the database I already have. I was setting up some things quite differently in the wiki, so I would have to make a lot of adjustments for it.

So in the middle of writing this post, I installed PHPMyAdmin, which went pleasantly well. Taking a look at the database tables for the wiki, I noticed that most of the tables TikiWiki created are empty. One table has the text of each wiki page while another keeps track of every link between pages. If I don’t try to do the latter, I bet I could use the database I already have and generate output that looks like the wiki.

Once I get the rest of my computer applications set up and running, creating a wiki-like output from my current database may be my next project.

Wiki Time Again

Categories: Accountability, Family Recipe Friday, Genealogy Wiki
Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 39 seconds

I finally got back to my wiki. It took half an hour to add Joseph Halbert. Then I switched to just adding sources. That’s going to take a long time too, but if the sources are already added, it should be quicker adding people later. I think I’ll stick with this for a while and see how it goes.

And I baked challah. I just gave the recipe to Fay Simcha on Facebook so I figured it was time that I use it. I’ve been saving it since 1983 when we baked them at Camp Ramah. I’m going to write a blog entry for Food Friday now.