New - Your Family History Magazine

With Nick Barratt, best known as a lead genealogist in the UK's "Who Do You Think You Are", as Editor-in-Chief we would expect the new Your Family History to provide a high standard of content. The question is: does it live up to expectations?

Priced at a reasonable £3.99 (I do hate 1p change!) contains 74 pages, excluding the cover, about 25 pages less than comparable magazines, and is printed on a heavier paper. The presentation is attractive, but what about the content?

Statistics!

After two issues the pattern is beginning to settle. There are twelve pages of advertising, two pages for the content and another two on news items. A feature I have not noticed elsewhere is a page devoted to media reviews and another four reviewing books, CDs and multimedia. Apart from his editorial Nick Barratt has an opinion page, and there is the usual couple of pages for readers to "Ask the Experts".

Content

Your Family History does not seem to be affiliated to any software or service provider, so I would expect the content to be free and impartial in its presentation. I am less than sure that this is always the case. In the first edition there was a two page article on arcalite on-line storage, and in the second a similar article about using My Heritage Family Tree Builder software, accompanied by a free disk. It is not clear as to whether these are advertorials, or not; specifically, it was the article on the latter which made me wonder, as it played down the necessity to pay the premium to get anything remotely useful. In fairness, later in the publication Peter Christian gives a "warts an' all" comparison of the Premium Account with Family Tree Maker. It would be helpful if the publisher would clarify this.

Some six pages in the first two issues have been devoted to beginners which should prove useful to them (although I did again notice emphasis on My Heritage in the second edition). Whilst it is too early to judge, the section on Local Archives detailed those available in south of England counties (Sussex and Kent). Since the publishers are in the north, perhaps we may hope for more balance in the future. The sections on Casebook, Social History, History Mysteries and The People's Archive provide interesting, and useful, social commentary on past lives or events, as well as giving information on the more unusual reference sources.

Finally, The "How To..." articles covered tracing shipwrecks and the aristocracy (I'm rather glad that they got the latter over with early!) and gave ample references for sources available to enable one to follow up leads in one's own research.

Opinion

I enjoyed reading the first two issues and hope that Your Family History will continue to provide more specialist information, as in the "How To.." articles, in the future. In general it has a nice balance between content for the beginner, the more experienced, and for general interest. As to whether I will take out a subscription, or just purchase when something interests me, I will withhold judgement for a few more issues.

Disclaimer

I have no connection with this magazine, nor any other, nor have I any connection with the software mentioned nor the competitors, although I am a voluntary tester for Legacy.

© Ron Ferguson 2010

Website Update: Complete!

Finally my revised website is now up and running, and I would like to review some of the lessons which I learned during the process of revising a genealogy site with some 7000 - 8000 pages. This was the first major rewrite for 5 years, during which time coding techniques have changed, and visitors are looking for increasingly greater interaction and usability.

I started thinking about the design in November 2009, with the major changes being to the index pages and applying a common theme throughout the site. The headers for the Pedigree pages and some others I decided to leave, except for colour changes. I have said before, but I will repeat, design is not one of my strengths, so it took two or three weeks before I decided to use a scheme based on the colours of nature, mainly blue, green and brown, with an index page design to suit.

To write and verify the coding took another two months of work (actually three months but one was lost through illness and holidays). I like to work to dead lines, so in November I settled on 1st March for the launch, revised to 1st April, and it actually went on-line on 2nd April.

Relaxation

I recommend taking regular breaks! In the early hours of one morning I was working away trying to get rid of a bug, and nothing which I did seemed to make any difference. I simply could not understand it! Only after a short break did I realise that the screen I was looking at was on-line and not the one I was working on using my PC.

Tools used

The Pedigree pages were created using Legacy modified to CSS with the excellent LTools designed for use with Legacy. For my text (HTML, PHP and CSS) editor I use PSPad which allows batch search and replace. Because I have inserted some PHP in all my Pedigree pages I have to change all the file extensions from .HTML to .PHP using Ken Rename, and, finally, I also have to insert some script into the coding. This can only be done after the previous processing and hence requires the use of Regular Expressions to locate the point of insertion. To batch process I use Actual Search and Replace, but note that it cannot write the search and replace the strings for you!

Testing

Arguably this is the most important bit, it is certainly the most time consuming! Because of the use of PHP, I cannot test the Pedigree pages in IE unless it is actually on the web, which is something of a pain. I do, of course, have a folder on the server which I only use for testing purposes, but there always seems to be a difference between how something behaves in that folder and real life!

Links can be tested on-line using the W3C Link Checker, and do remember that for a 404 Error Page all links have to comprise the full URL ie. "http://www...."otherwise even your CSS won't work. This will not quite be the end of it, though, as you, or your visitors, will probably find a few missed bugs for a few days afterwards - make sure they can readily find a way of contacting you!

Finally

Ensure a plentiful supply of coffee, and enjoy!

Genealogy Website: The Nav Bars

 A web page can be considered as being built on layers, the first being the base, or blank page, usually white but it can be given a colour. For my new site I have put another, slightly smaller, background layer on top, followed by the data and images. In my case I consider the nav bars as being a new layer since the drop-downs must sit on top of any data and images. One point about images, IE6, and earlier, do not recognise the ".png" transparency. Google will find many scripts to cure this, one of which is to be found here.

To date, I have used javascript for my drop-down menus, however it is now possible to write these in CSS. Unfortunately, because to do this the latest CSS standard is used there are problems with older browsers, in particular with IE6. The image on the right is a sneak preview of a section of my new index page, and as can be seen the drop-down sits on top.

To make them display on top of images is easy, simply use the "z-index" CSS style. However for other image forms it can be quite tricky. For Flash, within the "Object" tag the line < param name="wmode" value="transparent" > needs to be included. IFrames present a different problem, and to date, despite having tested varying "solutions", I have yet to find a way of stopping the nav bars from going behind the image for IE7 and earlier. Still, I've three weeks left!

Now, the above are the easy problems, again it is IE6 which causes the real head ache, because CSS drop-down menus simply do not work! To the rescue comes Suckerfish and the Sons of Suckerfish, which for my purposes I had to modify even further.

In my first Blog in this series I mentioned that I wished to eliminate/minimise the use of javascript, and for the navigation this has largely been achieved. As you will see to get them to work in the early versions of IE, and I no longer bother writing for IE5.5 and earlier, javascript has been a necessity, this I feel is a fair compromise. If those using IE6 do not have javascript enabled the navigation will not work, but it is still possible for visitors to get round the site albeit with more difficulty. (If you are viewing this using IE6, please upgrade, especially as you can now see our headaches!)

My final point concerns testing, I use Firefox for most of my development work and test in IE8, Opera, Safari, Chrome, Sea Monkey and Bing, these I have on my PC. As I do not have a Mac. I rather hope that if it works with Safari it will be OK (not really satisfactory, but there we go!). So how do I test in earlier versions of IE? A nice free piece of kit called IE Tester enables this to be acheived.; although still in Alpha version, and not every bit works fully, it does do the job, and for me is a life saver.

© Ron Ferguson 2010