A few notes on a website – Helen & Geoff

I’ve spent the last month or so working on my site bellsite.id.au It has a long history and really consists of 3 sites (maybe four) that now live together. I thought it may be worth stepping through the webmaster involvement through all this and how things have changed and the tradeoffs involved. Important learnings are about constant change – that makes what we struggle to get working today to be obsolete tomorrow.

My first site was netgm.com This began about 1998 when I formed a business partnership with Graham Le Roux to sell an online general manager function. Graham sold and I wrote code. Initially, I knew nothing about internet and modern coding and not many tools were available. After a couple of false starts, I stumbled across php and mysql – and have used them ever since. At first, I hosted the site somewhere in the US and brought it to Australia when Oz hosting became available about 2000. I’ve been with that same hosting service since – despite it changing hands. I’m on a very old plan that restricts my storage. However, the owner (Matthew Campbell, who is also support) is a wizard at provided support and security. A strange relationship – if Matt thinks I should be able to solve whatever it is by myself, he does not answer my requests. When he does reply, it is usually one line with a solution. Often giving me more access to the hidden parts of the site. My access is through cpanel – which I think is fantastic. (I’ve occasionally had to administer a site that did not use cpanel – much, much harder.) Through this period, I wrote every line of code on the site. I had to teach myself php, mysql, website hosting and webmastering. Learning every day to earn a living. Graham would often come back from a sales call and say ’they want it to do xyz, can you do that’. And I would have to have a working page within a couple of days. This partnership broke up about 2004, when Graham took a job with our major client. I wrote a book. During that time, I was also webmaster for Macquarie University Singers and learned a huge amount about writing php/mysql code in that role.

The second site began about 2007 when I wanted somewhere to host all my travel writing. I was looking for something that did not require me to write code. At that time, Apple had a free product (iWeb) that came with their Mac operating system. Extremely easy to use, it built everything needed with a few clicks of a mouse. I hosted this site initially at bells.org.au until they chased me because I was not a .org I changed the domain name to bellsite.id.au This was also hosted with Matt. As well as travel writing, both Helen and I were doing a huge amount of genealogical research. Both our trees were also published to bellsite.id.au Webmastering and administration of this iWeb site was trivial compared with netgm.com Not having to write any code was a relief. My ‘site’ lived in a folder at bellsite.id.au called ’Site’.
Because netgm was defunct but I wanted to keep its content, I persuaded Matt to ‘park’ that domain name under bellsite.id.au That is, it is stored at bellsit.id.au without extra charges. Netgm is in a folder at bellsite.id.au called netgm.com It can still be reached with netgm.com I did not maintain the netgm code at all from then to now (2021). The netgm site is extremely technical – with many calculators written to carry out difficult calculations – that can easily buggered up. Several used Flash (a movie) to display the calculator. During the time since those Flash files were written, Apple stopped allowing Flash and Adobe discontinued the product. I have not yet found a converter.Also during that time, I also became webmaster for Clanmaclennan-worldwide.com My friend Bruce McLennan began to try to record information on every MacLennan who lived between 1820 and 1920. This required managing a very large database and modifying the code Bruce purchased for data entry and display.

Notes on building Clan TNG site and database.

Work began in August 2011 when Bruce McLennan returned from Scotland with a box of cards and an excel spreadsheet file in which Fiona ??? had recorded details from Scotland Census records for McLennans in Scotland. Bruce immediately recruited me to workout how to make a useable, public site for this data. After investigation, we chose TNG (The Next Generation) software (written and maintained by Darrin Lythgoe in php) for the task. We installed the software on a server under the domain clanmaclennan-worldwide.com also hosted with Matt. Even at that early stage ,Bruce planned for it to be a worldwide project.

I was given/talked into doing the database work. Fiona’s excel spreadsheet contained fields for name, estimated birth year and a notes field that was very useful. The very last line in the notes field had father-xxx mother-yyy spouse-zzz. I parsed that line to put people into families. TNG’s database structure had tables for people, families, notes, places etc. I wrote php code to step through the excel file, parse each line and its notes and allocate each person to the people, families, places and notes tables. This 13,085 records became the foundation for all future work for the clan. That initial work took about 3 months.

My next task was to search for incomplete families and ‘make’ the family. Next was to hunt for people who were not allocated to a family – and present a human with a screen that presented possible families to which to add the person – orphans. A click of an ‘accept’ button did all the database work to add necessary entries for the person correctly into the various tables.

Bruce bought all marriage index records for McLennans in Scotland. I wrote a program to step through those and present a human with the most likely family or people already in the database. Again, clicking an ‘accept’ button added all necessary database table entries.

Similar projects were undertaken from birth, death and marriage index records from Scotland, Nova Scotia, Ontario, New Zealand, Queensland.

These tasks were constructed as required over about 3 years.

Because of the expanding work, Bruce began rounding up people to be editors and checkers. This turned out to be difficult. Many volunteers could not/would not follow standards such as a fixed format for a place name – required so that any one place had a unique address. Many volunteers turned out to be inaccurate. Some volunteers are very accurate and have taken on extensive projects.

The clan project has grown considerably since my early work. Much of the work has focused on adding source documents and certificates to confirm birth, death and marriage events as well as other historical documents. The clan document storage is very large and consumes most of our storage space on our server.

During this time, I was also webmaster for Sydney Male Choir. I wrote for them an admin system similar to myU3A. I was also in a business partnership with Bruce McLennan and wrote an accounting package for a NSW state enterprise that needed to clean up its act. I was not webmaster – just writing code for a tiny subset of the enterprises core business.

The third site began about 2012 when Apple withdrew iWeb (stopped supporting and stopped usage on Macs). I needed an alternative for my travel blogs. At that time, WordPress was just getting started and I chose to use the Google product Blogger. Blogger did all the coding work. I just had to write text on a WYSIWYG visual editor. Blogger stored the pages. I just had a link from a sub-domain geoff at bellsite.au That is, the subdomain geoff.bellsite.id.au The disadvantage of Blogger is its poor ability to deal with many photos. I take a lot of photos and lately many have been fairly good. I need something better to handle and display photos. After working with the U3A Wagga wordpress site, I decided to give WordPress a go. WordPress has a function to copy Blogger posts directly to WP without any fiddling. I moved from Blogger to WP and added two posts for our latest trip to Queensland. geoff.bellsite.id.au Unfortunately, there is no tool to move that old iWeb Site to WP.

Comment on that move. With WP, you will seldom, if ever, need to write a line of code. It has thousands of ‘plugins’ that allow you to do almost anything. However, WP carries a huge overhead of space. As a comparison, WP on bellsite takes 2.26 Gb of space for its 120 posts and photos. All of netgm.com takes just 13Mb. The old iWeb Site takes 387Mb. The two family trees together take 750Mb. All the slideshows to display photos on Blogger take 280Mb. A huge trade off of space for convenience. WP is extremely popular and has captured most of the website market. The space needed helps explain so many hosting services offering unlimited storage – you need it. With Matt, I am struggling along with just 5Gb and bumping up against that many times a month.