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.

First Family Page

I've been spending so much time working out how to record family details I've had very little for the Journal. In fact, I've spent more time making them easy to store and search than doing the records themselves! After a lot of work, I've sorted out a method and made notes to remind me while I got down to the hardest bit.

Slogging through the "Help Pages" of the wiki site I've been finding out how to easily manage space, create templates, use fancy editing features and all the bits of otherwise useless information to make life easier for once I have it all in place. It was almost a welcome break to settle down and link the different pages together so we have one single site for everything!

House Preston pages

As you can see from the picture at the top, the main page is updated and links to the various bitsin use all tied together in one place.... you know, when I started all this, I was sure it was going to be easier!

Anyway, its all done now and we can - I hope - start to see people using the set of sites to investigate the family and to record their own genealogy information for us all to see. There is to be some concern about putting details on-line, but I hope the Help Pages included in the records offer some fairly explicit advice.

I've had a couple of questions about the Creative Commons licence used for the pages - and some asking why I've not included it on all the pages. Since the second question is easiest, I start there and then explain the reason for the licence itself.

What it comes down to is simple - some sites, and Google, which runs these blog pages, is a particular example of it - have their own licence agreements written into the permissions to use the features they offer. These can and sometimes do mean that the Creative Commons can't be added to the site without permission and that is precisely why they currently don't have the licence added: I don't yet know if I am allowed to.

As to the licence itself, it is what is known as a "copyleft licence" (rather than a copyright licence). It works pretty much, but not quite, the same way as normal copyright, but means you don't need to get in touch with me to use bits unless you are intending to do what is not allowed - in the case of these sites, that means sell it, steal it or keep it private. Pretty much anything else goes.

Journal readers

Unfortunately, all this has meant that the journal readership has dropped like a stone! Over the last month, it hit the skids with very few visitors dropping by - and all of them from the UK, which is also a big change. We seem to have lost our Australian and New Zealand readers and since I asked them to get in touch there has been no response and no connection from our once regular reader from Alaska.

Of course, I blame myself, and will also blame myself if it doesn't improve, since I will be getting ready for the next year's courses over the next month as well. I will make every effort to get the August posting done and posted though knowing me I will either forget to do it or will write it and forget to post it - I do get forgetful at this time of year! It does, however, explain why very few bothered with the latest poll, so I will just remove it and leave the page as it is for now.

All I need now to make the last month complete is for someone to tell me the Alaskan reader is that idiot Sarah Palin and my misery will be complete.

Page Design Software

Last month, I looked at site design in House Preston: Doing Design but didn't mention what I would use to build pages and link sites together. Its about time I did, so I'll do that this month. All this was done some time ago - but the blog only went active in March. In fact, all this was done before Xmas 2007.

Design software

Its not some arcane mystery, if you stick to simple principles. Design is choices based on what you want. You can use a "Web 2.0" page like a blog or wiki - and I've done that. The host gives you design you can tweak, like the House Blogs. You just need time and inspiration.

The other choice is "static pages" that rarely, if ever, change. These are all over the web and can all be different if you like. For these, you do need design software to make each look just right.

Modular page design

What the simple choices miss is the idea of modular design, the most common going by the name MVC, or Model, View and Controller. It means everything comes in three parts: the way that it holds together, the way it looks and what it does. On the web, this is often overlooked.

The Model means the organisation of pages and the way they link: your site design. Software should keep track of pages and pictures to check none are "orphaned" or no longer used as well as any which are used but don't exist. Not long ago, when this was the deciding factor, there were three real choices: Dreamweaver, Frontpage or a few shareware applications that could do the same trick.

The View is the look and feel and could use things like the dreaded <font> tag or <table> tags to position bits of the page. If you are still using these, hang your head in shame - they destroy modular design!

Pages come to a browser as text converted into headings, paragraphs, coloured words etc. It works because buried in the browser is and always was a style sheet of instructions how to display tags. Someone thought it would be nice if users had style sheets to change what the browser did. If the user's doesn't have instructions for a tag, the browser goes down to its own instructions - cascades down the list of styles.

Several Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) tell the browser what a page should look like and are designed apart from putting pages together - they are truly modular. This was, in many ways, the final nail in the coffin for the awful Frontpage which Microsoft marched off into the sunset to be replaced by Expression Web but Dreamweaver marched into the future as the only sensible choice, though a few shareware and open source choices were catching up. In particular, one named NVU could manage - just about - the same tricks.

The Controller manages what the website does. Until recently, there were 4 main models for the Controller part of the design. Server-based software known as CGI or Common Gateway Interface can be called by the page and return information. Many pages use CGI, but years ago, Mozilla reasoned some could be software on the browser rather than the server. They added a feature known as Javascript which has become more or less universal. It was named to hitch a ride on the popularity of the use of applets written in Java - which is nothing whatever to do with Javascript. As usual, Microsoft had "philosophical objections" - sheer greed, the rest of us call it - and implemented their own version known as ActiveX objects.

Recently, a new technique has grown in popularity based on Asynchronous use of XML to pass data to a page, to be processed by Javascript. The initial letters give it its name, AJAX, which stands for Asynchronus Javascript and XML and it is the basis for "Web 2.0" pages. With older methods, it tends to be viewed as the be-all and end-all of the Controller, but nothing could be further from the truth!

Design Templates

Commentators forget it is design, not pages, that is modular. Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Expression Web and NVU all had page templates and still do. Often, they are treated as a pattern into which page content must somehow be squeezed. A good and effective use of templates has several elements which make the ideal design software and it is that I want to look at.

It allows - but does not insist on - the MVC model. It can use and edit Cascading Style Sheets for look and feel, link software for page functions and manage links and it carries the MVC model into every part of every page.

A good template tells you which bits can hold content and be edited. It tells you which bits can be repeated. It tells you which are optional. Finally, it tells you which are movable. Some may allow more, but these four are the main things a template should do. If we add those to our list of what a good web design tool must do, we come down to the same old faces - but which should you choose for your own use?

Software selection

There is no way to deny that up there in front is Dreamweaver, now owned by Adobe. It is without doubt the best in the field and should suit anyone with the need for design software and the money to pay for it. Unfortunately, it is a lot of money and for that reason I simply can't recommend it.

Thankfully, despite the odd protestation from Microsoft sales staff, Frontpage is now not merely dead, but rotted in the ground. If you already have it, bury it! If you don't have it then please God do not buy it!

The same can't be said for Expression Web and to be frank it is worth looking at if you are prepared to spend the kind of money Adobe ask for. For myself, I looked at the advertising page with a browser that was not by Microsoft - in my case I used Firefox - and you can see the results in the pictures here.

It took seconds to realise any product which produces this sort of Microsoft-dependent crap is not worth the money.

My advice? Don't touch Expression Web with someone else's bargepole!

Rapidly bringing up the rear comes NVU - which may or may not be as dead as a doornail! This is a totally unacceptable way to choose design software and for that reason alone NVU should be completely discounted from the running, but fortunately it carried on as an Open Source project based on the original NVU and developed from there.

The replacement is called KompoZer and is effectively the latest version of the old software with all its benefits and fewer of its bugs. Together with its unbeatable price - absolutely FREE - it makes KompoZer the natural choice for non-professional designers.

Best of all, you can simply download a copy and try it out. If you don't like it, you lose nothing and still have your hard-earned money to spend on one of the alternatives.