Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

A wonderful article was pointed out to me. It is something I had missed over the years, by Mark Humphrys in 2000, titled: “Hypertext Indented Narrative” pedigree format: Adapting the Burke’s Peerage format for the Web or: How to draw indefinitely large family trees by hand”.

What Humphrys has taken the Burke’s Peerage format, which has been used for hundreds of years to document, on paper, the huge and interrelated family tree of the Royal Family of England. He has adapted this for the web with hyperlinks and an ability to paginate the whole thing into decent sized chunks with family names all together. Using this, he is able to take advantage of the web, without a database, and manually and relatively easily maintain and update his large family tree. The result is a beautiful, well organized and easy to follow set of documents.

This interests me very much because Behold is the only program that I know of that can do something similar, and do it mechanically.

Humphrys goes on to describe his system. He foregoes the one-person-per-page format that almost every web-generating genealogy program uses, and builds pages of a manageable size. Each page will relate to only a single surname, although there many be many pages for one surname if there are a lot of people or a lot of information. The key is hyperlinking between them. This structure is maintainable, so much so, that Humphrys maintains his by hand.

Behold has all the hyperlinking capabilities that Humphrys talks about, but it does two main things differently:

1. Behold produces everything on one page. I could change Behold to produce each family on a separate page, but that is still not quite the same. Human thought is really needed to paginate the families for most readability. But Behold does allow you to select and organize families the way you want which is not perfect, but close.
2. Behold does not put the information and children of women with their husband’s family/surname. Humphrys’ system is surname-based. That is great for knowing the context of the people in a single “page”. Behold is different on purpose, because behold is family-based, and puts all the people of a given family together. Anyone related through marriage is in another section, and those who are completely unrelated to the specified families are in the last section. The family basis is done to allow instant generation of anyone’s family from their point of view, done using Behold’s “Instant Organize” function.

Despite this, the philosophy is the same, and Humphrys has some great ideas. I like the way he uses different styles of links to represent direct connections, cross-references and external hyperlinks. He has a good naming convention for his files. His concepts about linking to other’s data, and not sharing or merging theirs with your own is precisely correct! I do think, however, that Behold has a better structure for its source listing, organizing by source and citation alphabetically, with included hyperlinks to and from the data documented.

But the one key thing of his and my system is exactly that same: Each piece of data only appears in 1 place.

Right on!

Finally, I’ve converted most of the Behold over to the new design and onto the beholdgenealogy.com domain. I hope you like it, especially the more “forceful” delivery about what Behold is that I have given on the home page.

The Home, For You, Screenshots, FAQ, History, Future, Blog and Forum pages are completed. There’s only the Download, Buy Now and Feedback pages to go, and they’ll be done in a few days because of they have forms and scripts that I’ll have to verify work properly before I make them live.

I’ve also put up a new version of Behold that is the same as the last one, but gives trial users a new 90 days limit to try it. If you’ve purchased Behold, you can upgrade if you want (since it’s so easy to with Behold), but you won’t find anything new.

The really good news is that now most of this webstuff and blog and forum redevelopment is done, I can get back to concentrating on Behold itself. I’ve updated my future plans and I’ll be working hard towards trying to get the Beta released in December.

Thanks to everyone for bearing with me since last December while I did all this. I truly thought it would only take a month or so. But a month to a programmer always seems to be such a very long time.

I have now finished off everything I wanted to do with the Behold Blog and the Behold User Forum. They are integrated nicely and now have all the features I want. With their use of WordPress and bbPress and a solid PHP/mySQL base and large opensource user community supporting them, they should do me quite well into the foreseeable future.

If I am to be criticized of anything, it is that I have overcustomized the Blog and Forum to my liking. It is just a failing of mine. But it is one that tends to result in a good final product, once I do get there.

Back in my earlier What Have I Done to this Blog post, I listed 15 unique features I had put in the Blog and 7 other design considerations.

Of those I’ve removed:

• 4. The custom field where you live. Now I detect the IP address instead and generate the country and flag of where you posted from automatically.
• 10. The weather widget was very “expensive” in terms of slowing things down. But it was a frill to have it on my blog. I added a weather icon to my personal home page at lkessler.com instead.
• 12. The AJAX comment editor. I played around with all sorts of editing tools since then, including the TinyMCE editor to try to get entries done the same way for both Blog comments and Forum posts. I almost had TinyMCE working, including adding nice little smilies, but I found little problems with the results of the edit, with integration with my style, and with the icons they include. My conclusion was to just allow a simple text box entry as is default in both WordPress and bbPress and leave it at that.
• 14. I upgraded both WordPress to 2.5 and bbPress to 0.9 and that eliminated most of the hacks I had to add to get them to integrate. That was nice.

In addition to these, I’ve got a whole new host of interesting features that I’m very pleased with:

1. Complete integration of the Blog and Forum. Single registration and sign-in for them both.
2. Custom date/time display, that lists post time as time elapsed if less than a week old, and gives the date otherwise.
3. The search is available from both the Blog and the Forum. It is integrated and searches both the titles and contents of all Blog entries, Blog comments and Forum Posts. You can search for multiple words or include phrases in quotes. No words are ignored since it no longer uses the mySQL word index search.
4. Once on the search results page, it lists excerpts from the found items with the text you searched for highlighted in yellow. You can then subselect the search into only Blog entreis, Blog comments and Forum posts if you want.
5. The Forum main page shows the Four Forums as well as the most recent 30 topics.
6. I’ve added four cute icons to represent the four Forums and I use them in many places.
7. You can click on the headings of the topic list and sort by that item. Click again on the same one to sort in reverse order.
8. Entries by me are highlighted in light blue. If you are logged in, then entries by you are highlighted in light orange. This is done throughout the Blog comments and Forum Topics and Posts.
9. Blog Comments and Forum Posts have been made to look the same. For each, the user name, user id, location and flag, date joined, number of blog comments and forum posts, and date posted are shown. The user name will hyperlink to the user’s website if one was added to their profile. The number of comments and posts links to the search tool which will list them. I debated whether to add Avatars or Gravatars (pictures that represent you) but in the end I decided not to.
10. There is a userlist available (if you are logged in) so you can see all the other registered users, their country, date joined, and number of comments and posts. Each column is sortable and you can click on their number of posts to get the list of them.
11. The RSS feeds for both the Blog and Forum should all work well now. I found many bugs in the code from WordPress and bbPress that I fixed. This was not debugged that well by them.
12. It is worthwhile to register and login. If you are logged in you can post, you get access to the user list, your posts get highlighted in light orange, and you get access to another menu on the Forum page that allows you to list only topics that you started, or only topics that you posted to.

Wow! I only realize how much work that was after I write it out like that.

But hopefully I’ve built the foundation of a Behold community that people will feel at home at, find easy to use and encourage discussion.