The 21st Century Preston Family

Well, Christmas is over, the New Year has come and gone and we can begin trying to move on to more work in the website. Well, I say "we" but the truth is still that it is just poor old me, though there are rather more people who have become involved over the last few weeks and by the look of things may well be more to come. Our new members have all joined the Family Journal side of the site rather than anything else but let's face facts - the records are what really matter to pretty much every one of us! New members, though, have raised one or two issues that are relevant to our family in the 21st century and the way we can work together to help each other.

Applications and solutions

First off, there have been questions from one of our new members about the structure of the website and how it works to provide facilities we can all use. This takes us into the peculiar world of computerised solutions and applications and how they differ from each other - a matter of vanishingly small importance to most of us except in the way that it affects how we can use the website. To begin with, let's try a couple of simple definitions and work from there:-

An application is a set of tools that all work together as part of a single package that can be delivered to customers or users as one off-the-shelf package. Nice and easy - as long as you want everything in the application package and it has everything that you want to use.

A solution is a set of things that might be produced by different people for different uses that can still all be put together so that they deliver what you want to use. The snag with them is that they don't come in one neat bundle but instead have to be put together so that everything that is needed is collected into one place and all hooked up to the other bits of the solution.

Our website is not an application - it is a solution that is made up of several different websites that provide special services that are useful for our family site.

Truth and consequences

Two obvious questions - at least, they seem to be obvious because several people have asked them recently - that arise because of the structure of the site are:-

• What are the applications in our website?
• What does it mean for users?
  

Taking each in turn, let's take a look at the structure of the site, then what it means to us as users. After that we can have a quick look at the disadvantages of our site solution and finally wind up with the advantages that it offers. Most of the points have been covered before in one way or another but, since I have been asked about them, I am quite happy to go over them again.

Bits of the jigsaw

To begin with, there is the site itself - and this one is easy. I own and run a full internet domain (a place to store web pages and other things) which offers me the address "www.mpreston.demon.co.uk". Most of you will recognise this as a simple domain offered for free by my Internet Service Provider - Demon Internet - which I can use for my own pages. That is where the main pages sit and is used for hooking together the different sites used in our family pages solution.

Next up comes the Journal - the pages that you are reading - which is used just for keeping people in touch with developments and to inform everyone of what has been done, what is planned and what is currently under way. This is not provided by Demon Internet and is actually just the Blogger service provided by Google. Since it is not a part of the same company as the main page, it needs members to create an account (free, of course) in order to join in - though thankfully Blogger does allow us to add comments and join in discussions in the Journal even if we have not got accounts with Blogger.

So far, so good - we can use the website solution without actually needing to set up any accounts at all. Nice and easy to use, nice and easy to take a full part in and nice and easy to keep in touch with others using the site. There are even facilities to allow you to "follow" the blog posts so that you can be regularly updated on what happens in the site as a whole - though you can also follow the Journal without actually setting yourself up as a "follower".

Finally - so far - we have the Family Records and it is here that we have a different situation that does require you to join the site. This part of our solution, provided by Wikispaces, is a wiki - like the much better known Wikipedia site - so that we can all add, change and even remove entries in the records. When it comes right down to it, this is the main part of the site and the one where I expect to build up a very large number of pages - there are already more than 250 of them there - so that we can collect and keep up to date the full details of our family over the centuries.

Like most wiki sites, this does need members to join and set up an account before they are allowed to make any changes. In fact, the restrictions on the records are slightly more strict than the service provider insists on so that we can be a little more sure that people will not deface or corrupt our records - and that if they do they can be quickly removed from the site altogether!

Copyright and licensing

To be certain that all of our different components are allowed to work together and that any information on them is protected and legally safe, most of the parts are made up from open source software and are offered as open source products that can be linked together without breaking proprietary licence conditions. One issue that could cause a problem is the use of copyright on the content of the sites since they may be in different legal jurisdictions and be controlled under different versions of copyright law.

Thankfully, there are several open source copyright solutions out there and these have now been tested in a number of courts around the world, the most contentious of which is likely to be in the USA and even this has been tested and found to be fully enforceable. Links to details of how open source affects and is affected by copyright law in this paragraph point to a report on the testing of this matter in US courts for this very reason.

Of the various open source copyright - also known as "copyleft" - conditions that can be applied to information such as we record on the family site, I have chosen to put in place the Creative Commons licence to apply to the site. At the moment, this is only applied to the main site and to the wiki where we keep records of family members and even there we have not yet made it clear that it does apply by posting a link to the license on each page - but I shall do that as a matter of urgency, I promise!

Downsides and upsides

Obviously there is a major disadvantage to this sort of solution - you need an account on each part of it that requires an account and they can be different for each part. Wherever possible, users should do their damnedest to mitigate this problem by using the OpenID service (also a part of the site solution) so that a single logon can be used for all the different parts. Much less easy to deal with is the fact that each part of the site needs its own development of a standard "look and feel" - which still has to match as closely as possible the rest of the site.

On the bright side, that last disadvantage just means that poor old me gets more work - for you, as users, it should be pretty easy to find your way around and will even help you to recognise which part of the solution site you are using!

The major advantage, of course, is that if another feature is needed then it can be added without disrupting the rest of the site - and here, dear readers, we come to the crux of this posting. I have been asked by a number of site readers if it would be possible to add a forum - a place where we can post questions, answers, queries about the site, genealogy information not yet ready for the Family Records and so on. In fact, a place where we can generally keep in touch with each other.

As yet, I have not really begun to look for a way to add this to our site solution, but will be doing so over the next month or two (even though I have still got to change the main page for the site - so much work to do, so little time to do it!). I hope that this will be useful to users but there will inevitably be a downside to it - you will need to register an account with the forum provider as well as with the other parts of the site.

To make it easier to remember these passwords and account details, it is now clear that the best browser to use to view the site will be Mozilla Firefox and I shall also be adding this recommendation to the main site as well over the next few weeks. Other browsers will work, of course, but Firefox is well-known for its many ease-of-use features, a major one of which is its Password Manager to help you with exactly this sort of site.

Well, in the hope that this will answer the several questions I have had about the site structure and plans for the immediate future, I shall now ride off into the sunset and plan the next changes to be made. Perhaps by this time next month, we will have new features on the site... but more likely it will be April before they are in place.