It has been ages since I updated – the main reason being work and a very young family, soon about to get bigger (as I am at the moment). Work on my own family tree has taken a back seat as I have been trying to finish off another project – the history of the road where I used to live, Notts Gardens in Swansea. A website for this has had various incarnations but now resides at: http://www.twistyoak.com/nottsgardens. The process of creating this has been interesting and Iwanted to record it somewhere, for my own reference more than anything as my memory is so bad….
The site has been created using a local installation of WordPress. This was a new thing for me – but I followed the “famous 5 minute install” with reference to my web space provider documentation and it went amazingly well. I was up and running in no time.
Next up was to find a template to use. I hunted around the web for the free ones and eventually plumped for “Zenlike” (links at the bottom of the website) as being usable and simple. I measured the size of the main image in the header and then compiled my own replacement one by merging 3 of my own photos. With a bit of tweaking, I was able to upload this and it displays OK I think. Not the most amazing design but it was quick and easy!
Next, I thought about the organisation of the site. Essentially I wanted to build up a database of content – the source material in chronological order. WordPress isn’t ideal for this but I think I got it sussed pretty good for my purposes. For a historical blog, ideally you would want to change the posting date to the historical date of the entrybut you can’t do this as no dates before about 1971 will work (a quirk of the underlying code). So the route I chose was to put the date in the title and then sort alphabetically (and therefore also numerically). Each “post” is a chunk of evidence – this may be a newspaper article, a birth/marriage/death entry, a census return. The title of the post has to start with the date in this format “yyyy/mm/dd” followed by whatever text I want. This ensures that the posts will be displayed in chronological order (once I add the tweak to get them displayed in alphabetical order).See for example the entries relating to the Shooting Range at Notts Gardens.
The next step was organising my contents – I have used categories for this, as listed under “Content”. So “the Shooting Range” above is a category. You can see on the page for that category, the “Category description” displayed at the top and then the posts filed under that category in chronological order.
I use tags too, but these are more for indexing. This is great for historical stuff – I have a tag cloud down the side which enables me to bring up all posts on any of my indexed terms. For example, here are all the posts that refer to John Henry Nott.
I also added a couple of “Pages” on About the Site and the Source Material.
To get this far I have had to do some very basic editing of the source files, mostly php or css or html. These are all part of the template so that does mean it would be hard for me to change my template now (tho I have kept notes on what I’ve done). The kind of things that required a bit of alteration: displaying posts alphabetically not in date order (as added), showing the category description, changing how posts are displayed in a list etc.
I’m still adding content to the site and I don’t think it’s particularly “user-friendly” yet. At the moment its a useful site for me to keep track of my research and that is my primary concern. I hope to improve it as time goes on. I have REALLY enjoyed finding out about WordPress and exploring what it can do. I am wondering about using it in a different way for family history. A lot of the Notts Gardens site concerns the history of the Nott family so it has a small genealogy component too.
