WeRelate:News/2006

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December 2006

November 2006

  • November 30--Pardon our dust we are reworking the home page and navigation to accommodate more functionality.
  • November 18 We will be rewriting the help and tutorial pages. Please let us know what you have struggled with and what you don't understand. Your comments are very important. Help shape your community.
  • November 13 We're considering changing the titles of US place pages to include counties. For example, Chicago, Illinois would become Chicago, Cook, Illinois. We'd love to get your feedback.

October 2006

October 11 We have installed the latest version of MediaWiki. You may notice a new button here or there. Mostly the changes are internal and will facilitate development of new features and provide better performance. We have also made the system much faster. Please let us know if there are any problems. Person and Family Group pages are almost ready for preview sometime next week.

October 6-7 WeRelate will be at the Northern Utah Genealogy Conference and Symposium in Ogden, Utah (Eccles Conference Center). We will be at booth 132, and on October 7, Solveig will be talking about "Using Wiki's in Genealogical Research" at 10:00 a.m. in room 37. See you there!

September 2006

  • August 30-September 2 WeRelate attended FGS in Boston. The Show was a great success and we saw some you there.

August 2006

  • 11 August Our thanks to Aburski for wonderful Polish place additions and corrections.
  • 10 August We have been working on a new genealogy crawler for the last 3 months. It's now starting a new crawl of the web looking for genealogy pages. We should have a lot more pages searchable in about 3-4 months. While we're waiting we're going to add a bunch of new features to the wiki, so check back often!
  • 1-4 August WeRelate will be at the Genealogy and Family History Conference at BYU. We are in room 2279 booth 17. Solveig will be demonstrating how to use the wiki functions at the booth. Stop by and say Hi. Hope to see you there!

July 2006

  • 3 July During the 115 days since beta launch, WeRelate's homepage has been visited over 16,000 times, the search page has been visited over 40,000 times, 293 people have registered, and 83 articles and 127 user pages have been created. Great job everyone!

June 2006

  • 7 June FHLC film numbers have been added to the FHLC sources. This will make it quite a bit easier to search for sources by film numbers. Simply put the film number in the keywords field when doing a source search.
  • 1 June Place pages with Wikipedia content have been updated based on a more recent version of Wikipedia.

May 2006

  • 1 May Revising website to make pages less busy and easier to read.

April 2006

  • 8 April Hardware failure. A few hours after reloading the place and source wiki's we lost a hard disk. We were able to recover everything; however, we were down all Saturday morning while we copied the website to another machine. Backups are definitely a good thing to have! Please let us know if you notice any problems.
  • 7 April Found bugs in the way we handled diacritics in place names and in the way we handled special characters in source titles. The problems were pervasive enough that we needed to reload all places and sources, which caused us to be down most of the day on Friday. We re-applied the changes that people had made to places and sources so that no changes were lost. Hopefully we won't have to reload again!
  • 3 April Launched Source Maps, which allow you to search 1.3 million sources and display the results on a map.

March 2006

  • 23 March We loaded another 43,000 places for Asia, Africa, and Oceania today, bringing the total to over 430,000 current and historical places.
  • 10 March Official beta launch, with 5 million pages found on 58,000 hosts.
    • Thank-you to everyone who gave us feedback during alpha!

February 2006

  • 10 February Alpha launch of the site. Some of the functionality is still incomplete, but we wanted to make the site available and get feedback on what's most needed.