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Welcome to the Cam-Lug-Well-Family-History wiki!
Repository for the family history website Campbells, Luggs & Blackwells of Nelson, PA
Work on this website began back in 2000. It was originally conceived as a place to showcase a digital edition of the four volumes of the Campbell Cousins Correspondence, which was originally published in 1923 through 1926. Tom Zurflieh and Bill Thompson had republished hardcopy versions of volumes I & II with appendices of footnotes. But by the time Vol. II was printed it became obvious that our knowledge of the people and places mentioned in the correspondence was dynamic and ever evolving and hardcopy wasn't the solution. That if we republished the Campbell Cousins Correspondence volumes on the web, footnotes (and links) could be updated dynamically as additional info was discovered. It took years of working on it in snatches of free time, but with the help of the late Sandra (Buck) Garrett with transcribing Vol. III, eventually all four volumes were turned into web pages.
Even before Vol. IV was on the web, lots of other things had been placed on the our web site: photo albums, old letters, maps, write-ups of family and regional history, and minutes of old Campbell Reunions and of the Campbell Cousins Dinners.
RootsWeb was formed by, and run by, an all volunteer group of genealogy volunteers and financially supported by donations from users. Ever since the 1980s we had been using RootsWeb message boards to find and communicate with each other and had created our own mail list on RootsWeb to keep in touch. And we had published a family tree on RootsWeb's WorldConnect site, so the free hosting for family history sites on RootsWeb's Freepages was a natural and easy choice.
I had years of programming experience, but knew nothing about the design of websites, the design of web pages, or of the language used to create web pages -- Hypertext Markup Language (at that time HTML-3 was the standard). So I read books like crazy and embarked on using our word processing files of CCC Volumes I & II and their appendices as raw material for Copy & Paste operations. Freepage's advise to beginners was to find a home page that you liked the look and feel of, copy it, and replace the text with your own. So, that's what I did for our original home page.
As for the rest of the pages, then as now, word processing programs could take a .DOC file and generate a .HTML file from it. Often the resulting web pages looked reasonably acceptable, but the HTML code they generated was atrocious and almost impossible to maintain. And the HTML code generated from .XLS files was even worse. From my reading, I knew better than to go that route, and because I was a novice using HTML used a widely recommended WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor -- Mozilla Foundation's SeaMonkey. Like most WYSIWYG editors it allowed you to switch back and forth between working with the underlying HTML statements or with a facsimile of the web page it produced. You could get involved with the nuts and bolts of HTML, remain blissfully ignorant of it, or operate anywhere in between.
As I gained experience, I saw that although SeaMonkey was a fairly easy way to create webpages, the code it produced was much more voluminous than needed. And though not as bad as that produced by word processing programs, was ugly to maintain. I abandoned SeaMonkey and mostly relied on very elementary text editors such as NotePad. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) came into widespread use and were incorporated into our site. And as browsers accommodated HTML-4, some of its capabilities were utilized.
Our family tree on RootsWeb's WorldConnect and our family history on Rootsweb's Freepages were highly interconnected. On our family history pages, mentions of people's names were usually made into links to that persons records on WorldConnect. And even tho WorldConnect could not accommodate clickable links to Freepages, I placed a lot URLs on WorldConnect that you could copy and then paste into a browser tab. RootsWeb's Freepages and their WorldConnect pages had worked smoothly for decades and with the two sites being operated by the same organization, what could go wrong?
Things seemed well in hand until two big changes happened: a) the rapid decrease in the amount of webpages being viewed on desktop computers and the corresponding increase in the use of tablets and smartphones to view websites; and b) RootsWeb's servers crashing and their new owner, Ancestry.com abandoning RootsWeb's software for processing and displaying family trees stored on its WorldConnect site.
For family history sites, the impact of the server crash was much less than it was for WorldConnect's family trees. But the impact of users more and more using tablets and smartphones to view the web was major.
It took Ancestry.com about 6 months to replace their servers and to load backup copies of the webpages to the servers went fairly smoothly. The domain name changed. And the mechanism for uploading files changed. A widely used tool disappeared, but most webmasters adjusted to its loss. The files for some webpages were lost, but most webmasters had backup copies of their own, so for most of the family history sites business was back to their previous functionality. But THAT was a problem.
The huge growth of small devices that not only had tiny screens, but often had different rations of height to width was a major problem for most old webpages. Browser makers implemented a switch from CSS-2 to CSS-3 and from HTML-4 to HTML-5 to allow webpages to adapt to their size and shape. But in order to use those new features web pages have to be redesigned and rewritten.
There's always been a need to have a change control system for our website files, and access by others, but as long as I was doing most everything by myself, it wasn't critical. I'll cover the impact of WorldConnect's family tree problems on our family history website later. But the impact of the screen size variation means that pages need to be able to make sections of screens grow taller and narrower as the device width decreases. And what was a row, may need to morph into several rows or even into one very tall column.
Restrictions of Using RootsWeb's Free Hosting. We pay a price for using sites.rootsweb.com's free hosting:
- Server side includes and server side processing, such as PHP, is not allowed;
- Password protected web pages are not allowed; &
- Ancestry.com places ads on our webpages.
On the other hand, we get unlimited storage space and excellent uptime. And keeping out hackers is Ancestry.com's responsibility.
Page Layout Approach. There's ongoing debate on whether it's better to use Bootstrap or css grid framework for laying out web pages. And the "it depends" factors. For now I decided to start with W3.CSS grid.