{"id":2253,"date":"2004-02-19T02:44:36","date_gmt":"2004-02-19T18:44:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2004\/02\/19\/more-on-the-genealogy-project\/"},"modified":"2019-12-09T16:23:19","modified_gmt":"2019-12-10T00:23:19","slug":"more-on-the-genealogy-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2004\/02\/19\/more-on-the-genealogy-project\/","title":{"rendered":"More on the genealogy project"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:11718,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.geditcom.com&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20260212151621\\\/https:\\\/\\\/www.geditcom.com\\\/&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-11 18:44:00&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-06 04:38:11&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-06 04:38:11&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:11719,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.geditcom.com\\\/GCPhil.html#support&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20090225093849\\\/http:\\\/\\\/geditcom.com:80\\\/GCPhil.html&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-11 18:44:01&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:404},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-06 04:38:10&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:404}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-06 04:38:10&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:404},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:11720,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/phpgedview.sourceforge.net\\\/index.html&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20141129104601\\\/http:\\\/\\\/phpgedview.sourceforge.net:80\\\/index.html&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-11 18:44:05&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-06 04:38:12&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-12 22:29:07&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-12 22:29:07&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:200},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:11721,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.hanscomfamily.com\\\/genealogy&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/www.hanscomfamily.com\\\/genealogy&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p>I spent some time last night following up on playing around with software for tracking my family&#8217;s history on our website. So far, things are actually looking fairly good &#8212; with the one caveat that I only have so much information in my head.<\/p>\n<p>The first piece to the puzzle is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geditcom.com\/\" title=\"GEDitCOM\">GEDitCOM<\/a>, a Mac OS X application that reads and writes <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geditcom.com\/GCPhil.html#support\" title=\"The Philosophy of GEDitCOM\">standard GEDCOM files<\/a> (I had no idea that there <em>was<\/em> a standard file for genealogy software before I started looking into all this). While it&#8217;s not the prettiest application in the world, it does appear to be very powerful, and I&#8217;m quite pleasantly surprised by the amount of information that the GEDCOM format supports.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, I&#8217;m not sure <em>why<\/em> I&#8217;m surprised &#8212; I&#8217;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&#8217;re the first to come up with a good idea&#8230; ;)<\/p>\n<p>The second piece is the web package I stumbled across the other day &#8212; <a href=\"http:\/\/phpgedview.sourceforge.net\/index.html\" title=\"PhpGedView\">PhpGedView<\/a>. 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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s the one spot where I ran into problems: each time I uploaded the GEDCOM file that GEDitCOM created, PhpGedView wasn&#8217;t able to parse it correctly, and I got a bunch of garbage data.<\/p>\n<p>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\/&#42;NIX) systems do, and when the scripts tried to import the GEDCOM file, they saw it as one <em>really really really<\/em> long line. I was able to get around this by running the file through BBEdit and switching the line break style, I&#8217;m sure there are many utilities to do just that floating around the &#8216;net for people who don&#8217;t have BBEdit.<\/p>\n<p>Once I got that figured out, the import went smoothly, and as a result, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hanscomfamily.com\/genealogy\/\" title=\"The Hanscom Family Tree\">the first version of our family tree is up<\/a>. It&#8217;s very bare-bones at the moment (though not as bare-bones as it looks at first &#8212; just click around and experiment a bit to move around the tree), but mom promised to send me copies of the family&#8217;s &#8220;history box&#8221;. Once I get that and pop more information in, the tree will look a lot less sparse than it does at the moment.<\/p>\n<p>Even better, though, is that PhpGedView does handle one of the bigger items on my wishlist &#8212; user accounts with editing ability. I&#8217;ll need to put together a simple &#8220;user&#8217;s manual\/how-to&#8221;, 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!<\/p>\n<p>Every few years of my life, the genealogy bug has bit me &#8212; now that it has again, it&#8217;s great that I&#8217;ve got the technology at my fingertips to be able to store and present it like this.<\/p>\n<p>Now, mom &#8212; about that box&#8230; ;)<\/p>\n<p><strong>iTunes:<\/strong> &#8220;I Was Walking&#8221; by Poems for Laila from the album <em>On a Wednesday<\/em> (2002, 2:50).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I spent some time last night following up on playing around with software for tracking my family&#8217;s history on our website. So far, things are actually looking fairly good &mdash; and the first version of the family tree is up on the web.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2040],"tags":[13,65],"class_list":["post-2253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-life","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}