Site Updates

New features or changes on Michael’s Piece of the Web

01
Mar
2006

Family Tree Site dusting itself off

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.

Posted by Michael in Genealogy, Site Updates
26
Feb
2006

Upgraded WordPress

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.

Posted by Michael in Site Updates, Technology
11
Feb
2006

Charity page

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.

Posted by Michael in Interesting Links, Life, Site Updates
29
Jan
2006

Forms updated

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.

Posted by Michael in Site Updates
09
Jan
2006

Gatti Family Tree Offline

You may have noticed that The Gatti Family Tree website is currently offline. I’m sorry to dissapoint anyone who was looking for it. I did not want to take it down but some family issues forced me to.

While there is no estimated time until its return, it will soon be back and better than ever. Keep watching my site for updates.

In the meantime if you are someone who’s doing genealogy research and are looking for any info on the Gatti, Pannazzolo, Monzeglio, Martinetti families please get in touch with me because I’d love to talk to you and compare info.

Posted by Michael in Genealogy, Life, Site Updates
27
Nov
2005

Generate Secure Passwords

I just updated Michael’s Guide to Choosing Passwords with a new service from Steve Gibson’s (of the Security Now podcast) site.

The following is an excerpt from Michael’s Guide to Choosing Passwords…
A good place to go for a totally random password is GRC’s Password Generator (www.grc.com/pass). This website generates a totally secure, unique and random password everytime you refresh the page. It will generate a 63 character password. If you need a shorter one, just grab as many characters as you need.

Posted by Michael in Interesting Links, Site Updates, Technology
18
Nov
2005

Info for the tree all the way from Iraq

Last night I updated the family tree with some new data from my cousin Justin who’s currently serving in Iraq. Thanks so much, Justin, for taking the time even while serving our country.

See the family tree page for more details…

Posted by Michael in Genealogy, Site Updates
12
Oct
2005

Technorati

There’s nothing interesting for you to see in this post. Just move along and go about your normal business.

I’m just using it to claim my site on Technorati. It’s easier than going into my templates that I worked so hard to create to use their standard claim method.

Technorati Profile

Posted by Michael in Interesting Links, Site Updates, Technology
28
Sep
2005

Google Sitemaps Results

I mentioned before that I started using Google Sitemaps to give my site better representation in Google’s search results. I thought I’d give you an update on my experience so far.

First, my site is getting crawled more often. However, I don’t know how often because my webhost apparently is having a problem keeping my site logs working. But based on the reports from Google, the site is getting crawled. I’ve added some new HTML to the site that allow Google to find more of my pages.

However, the results have been kind of odd. Many of my pages have been turned into supplemental reults and now some are going URL only. I’ll keep you posted on whether this problem works itself out as Googlebot crawls my site more!

Posted by Michael in Site Updates, Technology