ManyRoads » Tools

Here today…gone tomorrow

Mark Rabideau — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:48:36 +0000

Grab the data while you can. I guess that is what every online genealogist needs to have as their motto these days.

Today I uploaded a very useful (helpful) WordPress plugin called:

Broken Link Checker- It checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.

Well much to my dismay and surprise when I installed and ran the plugin, it found nearly 175 out of 1055 links ManyRoads to be broken or redirected. That seemed like a lot to me. I had been running several ‘free’ services to check my site for broken links and every week; they were reporting ‘happily’ that everything was ‘just fine’- zero broken links. Obviously, these checkers were not doing their job very well!

In addition to noticing that a site as large as ManyRoads needs good automation, I think I can safely conclude you ought never to trust that another website will either stay online or keep reference information, which you need, intact. I even discovered lost links to lengthy articles from Wikipedia. They were simply removed!

My recommendation for self-protection is that when you find something useful and relevant do the following:

take a copy (keep it offline)
ask permission to publish (Keep it offline if you must); do not violate copyright laws!
check your sources periodically to see if they are still alive
if not… well then I really do not know what to advise. On ManyRoads I am simply stating that the material is no longer available where I found it, placing a date on the text and removing the link (Since WordPress keeps backups of my Pages/Posts hopefully I can find an old link if I need it.)
clean up your dead links; you need to do that in order to keep your search engine optimization in good health.

More later….

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Free Genealogy Forms, Software, etc.

Mark Rabideau — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:45:36 +0000

Genealogy Free Stuff!

Free Genealogy Forms, Clip Art, Books, and more

Free Genealogy Clip Art : Images, graphics, templates, fonts, backgrounds, photos, etc.
Free Genealogy Forms and Charts : Pedigree Charts, Family Group Sheets, Census Worksheets, Fan Charts, Cousin Charts, and more.
Free Genealogy and History Books Online : United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia.
Free Online Tools for Genealogists : Geographical location tolls, calendar tools, historical and economical context tools, and more.
FamilyTree Magazine: Getting organized and knowing how to address government agencies and organizations can help you get quicker, more effective results. Family Tree Magazine has created forms that can help you access and organize your family history information. They’re available in two formats: text and portable document format (PDF). The text versions give you the basic form structure in files you can open in your word-processing software. You can print, edit or even type your information right in the file. The PDF versions are read-only files with snazzier designs—they’re suitable for displaying or sharing your research with others.
ProGenealogists Free Stuff
FREE Creative Ideas For Displaying Your Family Tree Google Group
Free Downloadable Genealogy Forms FamilyTreeMagazine.com
Free Electronic Census Spreadsheets
Free Family Tree Wallchart Ancestors.co.uk
Free genealogy charts Genealogy-Mall.com Site is dead.
Free Genealogy Forms
Free Genealogy Forms and Charts GenealogySearch.org
Free HTML Pedigree Chart Site is dead.
Free Genealogy ChartsMisbach Enterprises

Free Software

GRAMPS- This is the software we use at ManyRoads! Gramps is a free software project and community. We strive to produce a genealogy program that is both intuitive for hobbyists and feature-complete for professional genealogists. It is a community project, created, developed and governed by genealogists.
Family Tree Builder- Family Tree Builder is a genealogy software for Windows. It offers excellent quality, supports 12 languages and is one of the best genealogy software programs you’ll ever find. It’s available for you to enjoy for free!
GedMark – Free Download!-A utility used to secure author information on every individual in a GEDCOM file during import and export. No longer Free.
GeneWebGenealogy software program with a Web interface. It can be used off-line or in a Web environment.
GenFinder Freeware- Bring the world of Genealogy to your Desktop
TimeLine Maker™ Free Download!-A handy utility that lets you record and chart histories, print color charts and publish as HTML documents.

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Technology for Genealogy

Mark Rabideau — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:21:21 +0000

Communicating your genealogical facts to friends and family can be both rewarding and important.

At eirenicon and ManyRoads, we pride ourselves in the quality and professionalism of our websites. Hopefully, you can appreciate the results of our more than 40 years of software and web development experience on our site here.

If you would like to have a ‘affordable’ genealogy website built using techniques and ‘Created with Free Software ‘ technology like those you see on ManyRoads, we are very happy to help. Please use our Contact page to begin a dialogue.

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Free- Basic Family Tree Service

Mark Rabideau — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 20:29:07 +0000

I just stumble upon a free service for those looking for a simple online Family Tree website. To quote the service itself:

Family Tree Guide

Family Tree Guide is about convenience.
Placing your family tree online with your own website and website address could never be simpler then what we offer. Our goal is to make this as easy for you as we can. All work that involves the website setup and maintenance will be handled by one of our capable staff, leaving you to handle only the research into the genealogy for your family. Because your family tree is web-based you will be able to access and edit your genealogy from anywhere in the world. And we do all of this for free!

Family Tree Guide is about choice.

With each website you have the ability to provide visitors unlimited access to your genealogy, or restrict their access. You decide! Enable users to view information on living people, add, edit and/or delete from your family tree. Enable a user to download your GEDCOM. Or don’t allow any of it! The choice is yours!

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Created with Free Software #3

Mark Rabideau — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 20:45:03 +0000

There are a fairly astonishing number of hidden and nearly hidden functions on good websites.

In communities communication between members is essential. The same is true of the internet. Good websites speak with one another and need to be known to each other. To accomplish these objectives ManyRoads employs additional hidden and not quite hidden functions, including:

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button- Help readers share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service.
All in One SEO Pack- Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
Broken Link Checker- Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.
Enhanced Links- Allows to get better control over the links listing. Also provides a widget view of the links. Please make a donation if you are satisfied.
FeedBurner FeedSmith- This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
Google XML Sitemaps- This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
Newsletter- Newsletter is a cool plugin to create your own subscriber list, to send newsletters, to build your business.
Simple Tags- Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.8 and 2.9 ! Suggested Tags, Mass edit tags, Autocompletion, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Related Tags, etc!

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Created with Free Software #2

Mark Rabideau — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 23:28:10 +0000

One of the great strengths of using an open source (or I suppose for fee) web development toolkit like WordPress is the wealth of add-ons that are available for you to employ to augment your site’s functionality and reach.

As I noted in an earlier posting, I am going to attempt to highlight several adjunctive software components which are employed on ManyRoads and how they help make the site a better and easier tool to use. In this post I will focus on Plugins that are largely invisible to the end user… or so they might seem.

As you hopefully are aware, there are lots of people on the web who would use your work for their own purposes. The most common class of these are spammers. Yes, websites can be spammed and almost always are. To prevent your site from accumulating undesired Comments, Posts, emails you need ‘weapons’, you need protection. The plugins, as well as other software functions, I find extremely helpful in this realm are:

Askismet- “Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.”
AVH First Defense Against Spam-”The AVH First Defense Against Spam WordPress plugin gives you the ability to block spammers before any content is served. Spammers are identified by checking if the visitors IP exists in a database served by stopforumspam.com or by a local blacklist.”
Bad behavior- Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.
Global post password- Enables you to define a global password for all password-protected posts.
HoneyPot – “Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.”
Secure WordPress- Little basics for secure your WordPress-installation.
SI-Captcha- “Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. In order to post comments or regiser, users will have to type in the phrase shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots. Adds security. Works great with Akismet. Also is fully WPMU and BuddyPress compatible.”
WP-Scanner Activator- This Plugin adds to enable wp-scanner to scan your blog.

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A good home

Mark Rabideau — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:05:35 +0000

Everyone one needs a good home. Your family website is no exception.

database

There are lots of reasons to choose one method over another, we have settled on having a company ISP- Internet Service Provider) run our web-site operations (data center and network) for us.

We tried running our own server in our home for several years before arriving at this junction. What we learned is:

Internet bandwidth is an ever increasing problem as interest in a site improves. More people (visitors) need more bandwidth.
Your site needs to be backed up regularly and have its contents stored off-site (or somewhere really safe).
Uptime needs to be predictable. People get upset when your site is down for long periods. They want to visit when they want to visit.
Running a server 24 hours a day costs electricity. Our electric costs ran about $10 per month.

Given these factors we ultimately elected to have ManyRoads hosted on
Hostpapa is a good (but not perfect) choice for us for numerous reasons including their provision of:

Unlimited Disk Space
Unlimited Domain Names on one account
Unlimited Bandwidth
Personal Website Tools
30-day money-back guarantee
email accounts (smtp & pop service)

Whatever you choose, you need to find a safe home for your family genealogy materials, somplace secure, reliable, and offering good ethical values. Hostpapa works well for us and a $5.00 USD per month we find it to be a comfortable and affordable home.

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Created with Free Software #1

Mark Rabideau — Sun, 30 May 2010 15:02:38 +0000

If you were watching closely, you probably noticed a new logo at the bottom on the ManyRoads web pages.

Although the image links to the single most popular piece of open source software that I use on ManyRoads, there are numerous additional tools employed in the creation and management of our website and family history.

Included among these are the following:

WordPress (the software with which the ManyRoads website is constructed- A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability).
50+/- WordPress Plugins (add-ons, which I will discuss in separate posts later on…)
GRAMPS (Gramps is a free software project and community. We strive to produce a genealogy program that is both intuitive for hobbyists and feature-complete for professional genealogists. It is a community project, created, developed and governed by genealogists.)
The GIMP (GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. )
Geany (Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. It supports many filetypes and has some nice features.)
Ubuntu- Linux (An Open Source- Free- computer operating system based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and is distributed as free and open source software with additional proprietary software available.)
DJVU (DJVU is a digital document format with advanced compression technology and high performance value. DjVu allows for the distribution on the Internet and on DVD of very high resolution images of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs.)

Obviously, I use software in addition to the aforementioned but these are among the tools most used in delivering, creating and maintaining the ManyRoads web presence.

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Protect your stuff…

Mark Rabideau — Thu, 13 May 2010 22:02:33 +0000

There are genealogy thieves out there!

Because of certain circumstances as well as the nature of our information, we have taken the drastic action of providing copy protection for all data and images on the WordPress side of ManyRoads.

Believe me, we do enjoy sharing our information, we truly do.

We just want to know where it goes and who is using it.

If you’d like any of our information, please use our contact form to request it. We are happy to be generous.

For those of you who use WordPress (and I recommend you do if you have need for a web-based version of your genealogy materials), I am using the Wp-PreventCopyBlogs WordPress Plugin to protect our materials. This plugin provides the following features:

Tracks the visitors who try to copy content (images & text).
Records the IP of the user who tries to copy information with a landing url of your site and referral url.
Displays a warning message regarding the site protection feature and tracking.
Disables the Right-click selection function of user browser(s).

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What Genealogy Tool is best?

Mark Rabideau — Sun, 09 May 2010 13:53:24 +0000

Many search but few find…

I think that old quote pretty much sums up what happens when searching for the right genealogical toolset.

Too often, people believe that their hardware or operating platform defines their selection choices. In truth, it rarely does. Almost any tool can be run on any platform. Certainly a bit of technical prowess may be required in order to achieve operability but it is very doable.

No, the reasons for picking a genealogical toolset should be based on your genealogy management needs not operating or hardware systems. What follows, in no particular order, are most of the factors that I personally see as being important (and I used for my choice of GRAMPS):

ease with which a web display version can be created
the ability to share Events, Places, Media (in technical terms– genealogy objects)
robust database facilities (in other words it supports large databases)
adherence to GEDCOM standards
easy Export and Import facilities
excellent backup, archive and restore capabilities
open software architecture (does not rely on numerous proprietary packages, tools, software or databases)
effective and helpful documentation
an active online support/ user community
robust bug reporting system (so that problems may be communicated to the developers and addressed in future releases)
easy integration with my WordPress BLOG and themes
simple image and document library functions

To me, these factors are much more important in determining whether or not any software package is going to do the job you want. Do not confine yourself to the narrow realms of your operating system or hardware platform. Pick the tool you think best satisfies your actual needs and find out how to make it work on the hardware or OS you have.

Here are a couple of examples of my tools at work

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