New features or changes on Michael’s Piece of the Web
I just added another new family member to the Gatti branch of my family tree. Bo & Tanna Wright had a baby girl, Annika Pacie Wright. Visit the family tree site for a link to her detail page and photos.
OK, so everyone has read the stats that say that most people who create blogs eventually abandon them. Looking at this site for the past month or so, you’d easily think I was one of those people. Well, I’m not, at least not yet.
The reason I’ve been so scarce is just because of stress. I’ve had a lot of other stuff to deal with. I have some stuff that I want to out up on various parts of my website, but there just seems to be too many other things to work on instead. I’ll eventually get to it though.
Anyway, just bear with me. My website never stagnates for too long!
The Photos section of the site has been completely redone. I added a ton of new photos, replaced a few out of date ones, and re-rendered the whole section using a new program.
After several months offline, the family tree is back! It’s got a new name, a whole new look and more features than ever. It’s no longer restricted to one small part of the family, it includes all parts of the family now. Some sections are still under construction, but just keep watching because more and more will be added over time.
Some features of interest are that every detail page now has a place for external links where you can see family members’ own personal wesbites, a surname list to give you idea of what names are in my family tree data, a genealogy research resource page and more.
I’ve been hard at work on the new family tree website. Just thought I’d take a second to let you know how it’s progressing. I’m done with the basic structure of the site and designed most of the graphics that are required. Now I’m working on importing all of the data from the old website. It’s a slow process but moving along nicely.
I mentioned the other day that I’ll be adding something to recognize how far-reaching the site seems to be becoming with the many Gatti’s etc. who have contacted me after finding the website. I’ll also be adding a new genealogy resources page to attempt to help other find info about their family. I’ll also be adding some more standard genalogy things such as a surname list.
Keep watching this blog for news.
You probably already know that I’m working on a brand new family tree website. It will be a big improvement over my previous site. Besides making better use of the technology at hand in order to make the site easier to manage and scale, I’ve also left a lot of room for additional content that I intend to add. It hasn’t launched yet, but I’m working on it finally!
As I work on it and go through all of the existing information that I already have available, I’ve realized something that is pretty amazing. My little website really does reach a world wide audience. I’ve gotten e-mails from so many people who share last nameswith people in my family. They’ve come from all corners of the United States plus countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany just to name a few. I see hits from all around the world in my site logs, but I often think that it’s probably just robots crawling my site. But the big folder of e-mails that I have from around the world tells me otherwise.
Anyway, just sharing my amazement. I’ll address this in a more formal way on the new site. If you’re a distant relative or someone who shares a surname, feel free to drop me a line or just post a comment right here in the blog.
I’ll warn you right up front that this isn’t a big update, but I just wanted to mention that I have finally began to work on picking up my family tree website up off the ground and dusting it off.
Sometimes in life a person tries to cause you grief and you let them discourage you. Other times a person tries to cause you grief and you turn that negative energy right around and turn it into creative energy.
That being said, a whole new family tree website is in its earliest stages of development. It’s not even in the form of HTML yet, but it’s basic brainstorming fills almost half of a notebook. I’ll keep you posted as progress continues.
I will make one promise though… it will be bigger and better than ever before.
After many months of of ignoring it, I finally upgraded my blog to WordPress 2. It’s a pretty significant update. You probably won’t notice any changes on the front end, but the back end it much different. Thanks to a bunch of new Ajax content you can now drag components around the screen much like you can on Google’s Personalized Homepage. It also features a WYSIWYG editor so you don’t have to tweak the HTML code f you don’t want to. Now of course, I still go into the HTML and make edits from time to time, but many of the functions that I always did by hand in the past are not automated. Of special interest to me are the graphic alignment and the link target parameters.
I just added the first new page to my site in a while. Linked from the homepage you’ll find the new charitable causes page. It contains links to some charities I think are worth some attention.
Visit it directly right here.
I just updated the scripts that run all of the forms on my website. Hopefully thi upgrade will stop the influx of spam that I have been experiencing.
You can test out the new script by clicking the guestbook buttons on the sidebar. It won’t look any different to you, but please let me know if you get any errors.