Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

I spent many painstaking hours setting up this blog under WordPress version 2.3.3. While I was developing it, version 2.5 of WordPress had come out, but I couldn’t upgrade at that time because my Newsletter plugin (which I haven’t finished implementing yet) wasn’t compatible.

So when I made this new blog live a few weeks ago, the Newsletter became compatible. Now I have the decision of whether or not to upgrade now.

My dilemna is that I’ve heavily customized the login routines for the blog. Oh the pain … I have to somehow get those working again with the new version, or I can install the new version and use the default login routines, or I can stick with the old 2.3.3 version that works.

The moral of the story is if you want to make upgrades easy, don’t customize.

Decisions, decisions. I’ll spend a little bit of time and see how much I can get working quickly. I’ve still got the rest of the site, the forum, the newsletter, the purchase page, and the download scripts to redo before the entire new site is live.

Meanwhile, the current version of Behold has only 6 days left before it expires, so I’ll have to release a new version quickly. It won’t have any changes at all, since I’ve been stuck on this new site stuff. If I had to do it all again, I wouldn’t have changed my site at this time. I’d have continued with Behold.

My leadership course was really good. After I described it to my daughters, they said it sounded like summer camp. It was a great week off and it gave me a chance to recharge.

I’m off tomorrow to a five day leadership training course. In preparation for the course, we’re reading the book A Leader’s Legacy. Right off the bat, the book puts you into the thinking of what type of legacy you’d like to leave.

Of course, I immediately turn that into thinking about Behold. Up to now, I’ve thought of Behold as my life’s goal. But that is looking forward, and making Behold the legacy I leave would be an excellent way for me to differentiate what is important to do in Behold and what is not.

The true legacy I want to leave with Behold is really to affect a change in the way genealogists use computers to record and use their data. If, through Behold, I change the thinking of other genealogy programmers to start developing software with on-screen word-processor-like data entry with attached sources, audit trails, and virtual merging, then I will have done my job.

As genealogists, we all already have a goal of leaving a legacy. That legacy is to discover and record and remember our family so that they will always be known, never forgotten, by our future descendants, relatives and friends. Congratulations to you on this!

It’s taken me a number of months to prepare the moving of my Behold site to beholdgenealogy.com, finalize the design of the new pages, and do the work to change everything over, starting with my blog. What has taken so long?

Well, like everything else I do, I like to ensure everything works well. You can see that in my definitive ideas towards Behold, and you’ll see it in this new site and especially this blog.

Even though I’m using WordPress as the engine, I’ve done a lot of customization and added many unique features to my blog:

1. I’ve added a custom login line, that changes to welcome you if you’re logged in.
2. I’ve designed my own profile page, which is minimalistic and all that’s needed.
3. I’ve disabled the WordPress “nofollow” policy (I disagree with it) to allow your links to be counted in search engines.
4. I’ve added a custom field for where you live, which will be displayed under your name if you leave comments
5. The Registration and Lost ID/Password functions are very different, as they start with an email to you for verification first - preventing junk from robots and spam engines from mucking up the database. I’ve tried to make those procedures as user friendly as possible. I’m very happy with them.
6. Normally WordPress sends you a random password, and you have to login and then go to your profile if you want to change it. But I’ve fixed it so that you can specify the password you want to use or change to.
7. I’ve put recent entries and recent comments and a search and archives in my sidebar in the way that I think is most useful.
8. The search function uses a really nice plugin that highlights your search terms in the results, and I’ve modified the way those results look. Eventually, I’ll get the one search to also search the comments and the forum as well.
9. I added all my old blog posts (about 600 of them) to the Archives section, and customized the way the archive pages look. I’ve also added blog comments that were in the old Behold Forum to the appropriate post as real WordPress comments.
10. I added a cute litte weather widget that I really like. This wasn’t hard, and it fits in nicely on the page. You now will see when I’m freezing or boiling.
11. I customized all the little icons and graphics and linking between the pages
12. I’ve added an AJAX in-place comment editor. This is my first foray into AJAX which is sort of like a live connection between your browser and the site. It does make the task of editing comments much easier.
13. I’ve taken out the complexity of assigning categories to posts. I don’t see why I should try to categorize, when all my posts have something to do with Behold.
14. The hardest thing of all was to integrate and get the Blog and Forum logins working together. This involved figuring out how to do cookies, and it’s a mess in WordPress 2.3. Version 2.5 of WordPress and 0.9 of bbPress are supposed to be better integrated, so maybe I’ll be able to eliminate some of my hacks when I upgrade. By the way, the Forum is almost ready and will be up soon.
15. And there’s many more things I’ve done both visibly and under the hood as well.

The blog uses my new site design. During the blog development, I also made my final tweaks to the design. This included these important considerations:

1. I’ve set up my site navigation in a distinctive line across both the top and bottom of each page, and the current page is highlighted with white text on a blue background.
2. I had a lot of trouble deciding how to style hyperlinks. I finally went with underlined hyperlinks that are the standard blue when not visited and purple when visited, since most people will recognize these without even thinking. But to make them distinctive, they are highlighted with a blue background when you mouse over them.
3. I settled on a default font size. It is larger that the original design, but still is somewhat on the smaller size. Hopefully you like the look of it.
4. For those of you who need larger fonts, I figured out how to allow the site to nicely change size properly when you use your browser’s font size changer or zoom tool.
5. I hate the way some sites look different when you print them, often only including just the some of the text and no structure. So I’ve ensured that mine will look the same printed as on screen.
6. I’ve tried to eliminated inconsistencies in how the different browsers, mainly IE6, IE7 and Firefox, make my site look. This was not easy as I had to track down solutions to dozens of problems.
7. I’ve hopefully eliminated all webpage errors as detected by Firefox.

But it’s a relief to finally get this up and to be able to start using it. Hopefully the blog and the (almost ready) forum will encourage a lot of future Behold discussion.