I spent some time last night following up on playing around with software for tracking my family’s history on our website. So far, things are actually looking fairly good — with the one caveat that I only have so much information in my head.
The first piece to the puzzle is GEDitCOM, a Mac OS X application that reads and writes standard GEDCOM files (I had no idea that there was a standard file for genealogy software before I started looking into all this). While it’s not the prettiest application in the world, it does appear to be very powerful, and I’m quite pleasantly surprised by the amount of information that the GEDCOM format supports.
Of course, I’m not sure why I’m surprised — I’m obviously not the first person to look into how to track all this information using a computer. I guess we all just like to think that we’re the first to come up with a good idea… ;)
The second piece is the web package I stumbled across the other day — PhpGedView. A set of PHP scripts, it was very easy to install and get up and running, all I had to do was copy the scripts into a directory on the webserver, tweak the permissions on two files and one directory, and I could log into the interface and start putting things together. Again, it’s not as pretty as it could be, but it does look like nearly (if not entirely) all of the functionality that I was looking for is there.
Once PhpGedView is installed, all you need to do is upload a standard GEDCOM file and PhpGedView parses it and creates the final website. Here’s the one spot where I ran into problems: each time I uploaded the GEDCOM file that GEDitCOM created, PhpGedView wasn’t able to parse it correctly, and I got a bunch of garbage data.
Turns out that the solution is fairly simple, and ties into an age-old issue between Mac and PC file formats. Mac systems use a different character to signify the end of a line than PC (DOS/*NIX) systems do, and when the scripts tried to import the GEDCOM file, they saw it as one really really really long line. I was able to get around this by running the file through BBEdit and switching the line break style, I’m sure there are many utilities to do just that floating around the ‘net for people who don’t have BBEdit.
Once I got that figured out, the import went smoothly, and as a result, the first version of our family tree is up. It’s very bare-bones at the moment (though not as bare-bones as it looks at first — just click around and experiment a bit to move around the tree), but mom promised to send me copies of the family’s “history box”. Once I get that and pop more information in, the tree will look a lot less sparse than it does at the moment.
Even better, though, is that PhpGedView does handle one of the bigger items on my wishlist — user accounts with editing ability. I’ll need to put together a simple “user’s manual/how-to”, but this will allow other people in the family to add and edit information to the database. Once changes are made, I can then download the updated GEDCOM file from PhpGedView to my computer, re-import it into GEDitCOM, and keep all the information synced between my personal workspace and the website. Not bad at all!
Every few years of my life, the genealogy bug has bit me — now that it has again, it’s great that I’ve got the technology at my fingertips to be able to store and present it like this.
Now, mom — about that box… ;)
iTunes: “I Was Walking” by Poems for Laila from the album On a Wednesday (2002, 2:50).