Dallan and Solveig’s Blog

A new version of the Family Tree Explorer is now available. Here’s what’s changed:

• The “pedigree & descendants” (hourglass) view is now animated. Clicking on someone in the view brings them to the center of the view, and the other pages in the view move around to make room for the newly-displayed relatives. In addition, family pages are now displayed as ovals, to make them more visually distinct from person pages. These two changes should make it much easier to navigate trees and keep context of where you are. (For a cool visual effect, try changing the direction of your tree — select one of the three radio-buttons just above the tree.)
• In order to make the Family Tree Explorer work better for very large trees, I disabled sorting people and family pages by date in the index view.  Sorting people and families by birth/death/marriage date required caching all of the pages in the tree on your local hard disk — which took quite a long time if you had thousands of pages.  So now if you select person pages in the index view, the view is automatically sorted by the person’s surname.  And if you select family pages in the index view, the view is automatically sorted by the husband’s surname.  Please leave a comment if you really miss the ability to sort by date.
• In addition to clicking on the “Tree +” or “Tree -” links in the upper right-hand corner of the page, you can now also add and remove pages from your tree using the Family Tree Explorer menus (right-click on the page, or click on “Add this page” in the Add menu at the top of the screen, or click on the green + button).
• You can open and navigate someone else’s tree without the annoying messages about needing to save the tree as your own.  This should make it easier to share your tree with others.  If they do choose to save the tree as their own they’ll be able to bookmark people in the tree and add/remove people to/from the tree.
• I removed the “Changed pages” view and the need to”acknowledge changes”.  It seems that having the pages on your watchlist and receiving an email whenever a page is changed is sufficient notification.  Having to “acknowledge” changes again inside the Family Tree Explorer seemed like double work.

Please feel free to comment on anything you like (or don’t like) about these changes.

What a difference a single announcement in a single newsletter can make. On Wednesday the Rootsweb newsletter featured a short announcement about WeRelate under the heading “A Website Worth Looking At”. People must have taken that advice pretty seriously, because we had over 10 times the normal traffic that day. Also, over 100 GEDCOM’s containing over 150,000 people were uploaded that day. This unexpected load caused the website to be slow, and caused a big problem for the GEDCOM uploader, which doesn’t normally handle more than 50,000 people a day, so by the end of the day Wednesday there was a 2-day turnaround time for processing new GEDCOM’s. Things were caught up on Friday. WeRelate now has over 1,000,000 person and family pages.

I just wanted to add a big THANK YOU for our volunteer administrators. WeRelate is becoming a great community website largely due to them.

The last month has been spent packing and unpacking for our move to a new home in Minnesota.  What a lot of work!  The last time we moved was 10 years ago.  Ten years and three children sure makes for a lot of extra stuff.  But we love it here, so it’s worth it.

For any “techies” reading this, we moved WeRelate to Amazon’s EC2 hosting service as part of the move.  Putting a website on EC2 requires extra coding for backups and failover in case of hardware failure, but if you’re willing to do the extra coding it seems to be very cost-effective.

We just posted a new look for WeRelate based upon a design by Art Fyvolent at USF’s Africana Heritage Project. (Thank-you Art!) Let us know what you like / don’t like about it.

Several significant changes have been made to WeRelate.

• Network: There is a new “Network” page available from the MyRelate tab. The network lists all users that are watching the same pages as you — people with whom you have something in common — and provides links to their user talk pages to make it easy to communicate with them.
• Family tree management: You can create, rename, and delete family trees and view pages in trees or launch the Family Tree Explorer directly from the Family Tree tab.
• Sharing: You can email a link to a single page or to your entire tree to anyone, even people who are not members of WeRelate. If you email a link to your tree to someone else, they can save the tree as their own tree and the two of you can start working on the same pages.
• More intuitive tab and button names: “Create” is now “Family Tree”, “Connect” is now “Search”, “Research has been moved into the “Wiki” tab, “Move” is now “Rename”, and “Discussion” is now “Talk”.
• MyRelate: The MyRelate page has been redesigned to make it easier to read.
• Images: Uploading images from person & family pages is easier because the name of the newly-uploaded image is automatically entered into the person or family page. Also, you can link images directly to the people and families associated with the image. Links are bi-directional, so if a person or family page links to an image, then the image will automatically link to the person or family page, and vice-versa. Information about the people that the image links to (birth & death dates & places) automatically appears on the image page.  Because you can now link directly to people and family pages, entering surnames for the image is no longer supported.
• Talk pages: Talk pages have “forum-like” functionality. There is a button to add a new topic at the top of each talk page, and next to each topic header there is a link to add a new comment to the topic. Whenever a new comment is added to a topic (or the topic is edited), the date of the comment/edit is automatically appended to the topic header. This makes it possible to tell which topics have been commented/edited recently by looking at the table of contents for the talk page. Finally, topic headers appearing in “diff” screens often contain links to that topic on the talk page.

Please let us know if any of these changes aren’t working, don’t make sense, etc.

It looks like we’re moving to Minnesota next month, so I’m taking the opportunity to move the quass.org website out of the basement and into a hosting center. GoDaddy makes this very easy. It’s too much trouble to transfer over the old blog postings so I’ll just start fresh.