A new and improved site is already under way. I have been working on the front page of the tracingourhistory.com site and I think it is already looking far better then the current site. I am really keen for the new site to be a major improvement on the current site and I’m encouraged by what I have at the moment, even though it is only a start.
Have a peek at:
http://tracingourhistory.com
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.
The newsletter for ‘Kevin’s Family – Online History Site,’ known as ‘Kevin’s Mailout,’ will be discontinued. In fact, the newsletter’s last issue was back in 2004, so it could be argued that it had already been discontinued and this is a fair argument. I did begin another issue in 2008, but it was never completed.
With the emergence of this Blog, ‘Tracing our History,’ the newsletter seems to be somewhat superfluous, even though there are undoubtedly a great number of family members and friends who don’t have Internet access. Having said that, I don’t believe there was any ‘official’ circulation of the newsletter in hard copy anyhow.
Anything that I would have placed in the newsletter will now be placed on the Blog instead and will not have to wait (possibly years) for the next issue of the newsletter. This seems a far better idea to me and will save a large amount of work for me also. The energy used in putting together a newsletter can now be placed into actual research and web site development, which will also be a far better result I think.
The archives of the newsletter will still be available via the web site at:
http://particularbaptist.com/matthewshistory/newsletter.html
Tracing Our History 