Just a small note to let my readers know that I will soon be returning to this Blog and my other Blogs after a short break. I took a couple of days off and went on a short trip, then returned home to scenes of a major storm and more damage around the place, with no electricity for a short period. Also when I went away I forgot to pack the power lead for my lap top.
I had originally not planned any breaks from Blogging, so a series of events has led to my breaking from posting.
I thought I’d post a quick update on what is currently happening with me and posts to my Blog. It is a short story really. I live in a town which is a massive tourist destination during the holiday season – especially at this time of year. What this means for me – being reliant on wireless access to the Internet – is real difficulty gaining Internet access. There are so many people in the area, using so many gadgets and the like, that the Internet is locked into a constant traffic jam. It is practically impossible to get Internet access most of the time. You do get the odd time where you can get access, but it is so slow that it is pointless to try and use it. For example – it takes minutes and minutes just for one page of the Blog to load.
I’ll keep trying to access the Net every so often, but it is likely I’ll be unable to post much for the next couple of weeks. There is good news – the number of tourists in the shopping centre here have diminished, which probably means we are heading back to some form of normality.
I have had some surgery in recent times and while everything seems to be going OK, healing well and all the rest, I have been finding some difficulty while sitting at the computer – so I have been easing off on the posts in recent times. I expect this will continue for the next couple of weeks or perhaps a bit longer than that. I don’t intend to stop posting completely, but there will be far fewer posts during this period. One or two Blogs that I have will receive no posts during this time, while one or two others will continue to receive the same number of posts throughout this period. However, it is all a bit of a daily thing as to just how many posts I upload.
So all is going well, but a bit of a break and rest is needed to ensure a full recovery. Thanks all 🙂
I have now added a Blog for the History section of the site. The Blog is called ‘History for Today.’ A link to the Blog will soon be added to the History section of the site.
Visit the Blog at:
http://inhistorytoday.wordpress.com/
I have now added a Blog and Guestbook to Kevin’s Portal. The Blog is simply a news update Blog for the site, announcing changes to that site and comments on new links added to it and/or links removed from it.
Work is progressing well on the new site and already some sections of the site are going live and working well. I have now got the newsletter section of the site running, along with the first edition of a new newsletter.
The new newsletter is called ‘Research – The Tracing our History Newsletter,’ or ‘Research’ for short. The newsletter archives will be hosted at Scribd, but you will be able to download them from the tracingourhistory.com site via an embedded widget from Scribd. With this widget from Scribd I will no longer need to update the site when adding a newsletter – just simply upload the newsletter to Scribd and the embedded widget updates the site automatically. All very easy.
How can you subscribe to the newsletter? You don’t need to really. If you subscribe to the Tracing our History Blog you will be notified when a new issue of the newsletter is posted and you can then go to the site to download the issue. Those who do not have Internet access will need to let me know (or via someone that does) that they would like to have a hard copy sent to them – or, someone may be able to print them a copy.
Get the first issue of Research at:
http://tracingourhistory.com/newsletter/research.html
Have a peek at the new site at:
http://tracingourhistory.com
I have just registered the domain name tracingourhistory.com for my family history site. I will no longer be updating the old site at http://particularbaptist.com/matthewshistory/index.html .
So what does this mean? You will need to continue to use the old site for the next couple of months while I build the new site/transfer files. When the work is completed I will add a link to the new site (at the old site) directing users to it. This work will need to be completed by June 2011, for this is when I will no longer have an account at the current host. The new domain, tracingourhistory.com, will be on a new host site. This will save me a fair amount of money over time.
The new site will bring all the sites associated with my family history under the same name of ‘Tracing our History.’ This name takes the focus of any one particular surname such as Blanch, Lilley or Matthews, and allows the user of my site to look at all the surnames being researched without bias to any one in particular. I want to be able to include all of the family in my collaborative and interactive research site/s.
By doing this I am hoping to establish the next step in my family history research and provide a much better tool for my family and those family members yet to come.
You will be able to follow my progress on the new site by visiting the tracingourhistory.com site. This Blog will also follow progress on the site and the feed is also on the old site.
It has been a little while since the last Blog post here at Tracing our History – not a great deal has happened in that time. To be honest I’ve had a lack of interest in family history. However, my interest levels have risen again and I have to thank those who have sent emails to me over the last little while. My lack of interest was ‘sparked’ by bickering on one side of my family, but now the other has ‘refreshed’ my interest by their interest in familial matters. Thank you so much for that.
Part of my interest in family history over the last 10 to 20 years, has been to preserve what I can for future generations. Sure, I’ve been very interested in my past and my family’s past to answer my own curiosity, but I’ve also wanted to have something there for those who come after me. Our history is being lost and I want to be able to preserve as much of it as I can. I have also longed for this exercise to be a collaborative matter, with others in the family also taking part in the preservation of our history. Thankfully, there are a number of people on my mother’s side who seem keen to research that history from varying perspectives (all of which helps with the overall story) and who are also willing to share and collaborate in that research. This can only be good for all of us and for those that follow.
I am still looking at ways to make that process easier and more profitable for us all – to develop a sort of place that we can come back to time and time again, to just touch base, share our research, nut out issues we may have in that research, see if we can help each other, etc. To do this, I think I will have to develop a dual approach – tools for my mother’s side and tools for my father’s side. There is already a Matthews social network available on Geni (which I set up). I am hopeful that on my mother’s side of things the experience will be a far better one (and all indications seem to point that way).
Over the next couple of days I am hoping to get a social network site up and going for my mother’s side of the family, which would include such surnames as Lilley, Jenkinson, Blanch, etc. I want to try and tie this Blog, the social community I have already set up for family members, my actual website and a family tree social network (for my mother’s side) together, so that they kind of work together – there will probably be a few passwords needed (helpful for privacy and security reasons). Anyhow, keep a look at the Blog here – I will keep updating things via the Blog.
In my last Blog post I made some comments regarding Delicious, the online bookmarking social network owned by Yahoo. Things may not be as desperate as I feared in that area, so I am keeping with Delicious at the moment. Hopefully it will be sold and continued, as it is a very good service.
I have now renamed the website to ‘Tracing our History.’ So this means that the Blog is named ‘Tracing our History,’ the community is named ‘Tracing our History’ and the main web site is called ‘Tracing our History.’ Hopefully this won’t lead to confusion – hopefully it will tie the three main sites together, with all three being part of the same online collaboration. At least that is my aim – hopefully I hit the target.
The forced changes to the site continue, with the recently begun updates to the site now having to be changed again. Why? Well, now Yahoo are dropping the Delicious bookmarking service, which is one of the social networking/sharing services I have started to added buttons to make easier sharing for site visitors. I will start to remove this button from today. As I update a page I will remove the sharing with Delicious button. It is disappointing, because I really liked the Delicious service. So Yahoo does it again – very poor Yahoo!
I am still working away at improvements and content additions.
Having Blogged about the ‘History’ community in my last post here, it wasn’t that long after that that it became necessary to remove the ‘History’ community, as well as other communities hosted at Grou.ps. The reason for this was that Grou.ps were quickly moving to adopt a more ‘premium’ model of service. I would have been happy to pay for a premium service if that service was in fact premium, but because it was still full of bugs and problems I opted out and decided to move my operations elsewhere. At the moment I have no ‘History’ community, which is fine. I will adapt a page or two on the site for that purpose in time to come.
The ‘Tracing our History’ community, which was aimed at family members, faced the same issues as the ‘History’ community. I have already begun the process of moving this community elsewhere. It can found at Spruz and is only in the early stages of development. If you are a family member, please get on board even now and be part of the community as it grows.
Visit the ‘Tracing our History’ community at:
http://tracinghistory.spruz.com/
I have also begun some further work on the main website itself. I am very tempted to rename the site as ‘Tracing our History’ and will probably do so very soon. This will keep the three main affiliated sites – the Blog, the community and the main site – all named the same. I think this works much better.
Improvements to the site are under way, including major reviews of the family tree and family history book. Both of these will soon be hosted in more secure locations.
Tracing Our History 