NZGDB Newsletter #5, 8th October, 2007
Changes to the system this month include: -
·
Change 1:
Separate Ged processing from document submission
·
Change 2: A
new page, “Useful Web Sites” is the first (and so far only) entry in a new
section, “Resources”. Please add your
favorite URL’s to this list.
·
Manage your GDB Data now includes statistics
on duplicate links between your data and other user’s data.
·
A logon problem, and its fix, is
described. If you are having trouble
logging on, have a look at this: you may be having the same problem.
·
A Design question. Should I separate “Soft Links” into “GDB
Links” and “Scrapbook”.
NZGDB continues to grow.
We now have over 1.4M records of people in the NZGDB. We have also noted that the number of
registered users is now growing much more rapidly than before, presumably as a result
of publicity through sites such as Coraweb
and Cyndi’s List, plus a few
newsletter articles and presentations to NZSG meetings.
Changes to the Home Page
A couple of changes have been made to the Home page menu. The option “Add GED” has been removed from
the Documents section, and replaced by “Add or Update your Family Data” in the
Genealogy Database section. A new
section, Resources, has been added, starting with a page to display useful web
sites: -
Change 1: GED submission
The page that opens from “Add or Update your Family Data” has
essentially the same function as the previous “Add Ged” page, plus also a
button to allow direct on line data entry: -
You are no longer asked to distinguish whether this submission is first
time, or an update, or replacement. The
program now works that out itself: if it’s the same name as your previous GED,
then it’s an update.
Change 2: Useful Web Sites.
This menu option opens a page to search the table of useful web
sites. It’s simply not possible for us
to keep up with the thousands of possible web sites on our own, so please add
your own sites, and any other sites that you think may be interesting to others
You
can now see the number of duplicate records detected to/from your own records.
Last month’s newsletter described how the system now attempted to detect
duplicate records, linking them with a Duplicate(score) soft link. All very useful if you open a record for
which duplicates have been detected, but how do you know which users have only
occasional overlap with your records, and which overlap extensively? To give you this information, a new display
now tells you the number of duplicates detected between your records and each
other source.
From the home page, click the link “Manage your GDB Data”. Below the list of permissions (if any)
there is now a new table that shows the number of duplicate links between your
source(s) and others. For example, the
first line shows that my source “barnes.GED”, which contains 1499 records, has
70 duplicate links to user dbarnes’s source “Donald Barnes.GED” containing 915
records.
Other Changes
There are also a number of other changes. Click here for a complete list.
Problem logging into NZGDB
After being able to log into NZGDB without problems since its initial
development, last month I suddenly encountered problems.
1.
When I attempted to log in from my normal computer, the user name and
password fields were cleared, there were no messages, but instead of the home
page appearing the login page was redisplayed.
I couldn’t seem to get past it.
This applied to any of the valid account/password combinations that I
knew.
2.
I could however open unrestricted pages, such as the FAQ, or other web
sites.
3.
When I used an invalid password or user id the usual error messages were
produced.
4.
This applied when I attempted to log in from my normal computer. However I was able to log in normally from
another computer. Other users did not
seem to be affected. My daughter was
able to log in normally, and she could also log in as me when I gave her my
userid and password.
5.
I was able to get into the system through the [New User] dialog, creating
a new account. Once through the
registration dialog everything functioned normally for this account until I
logged out. However, once logged out I
could not log in again with this new account either – it behaved exactly like
all the other account/password combinations.
If you are having logon problems, does any of this sound familiar? If so, my fix may be useful to you too.
I consulted with Microsoft, and we concluded that the problem was not in
my code, nor on the server, but was a setting somewhere on my laptop. I first tried clearing Internet Explorer’s
cache, and then I reinstalled Internet Explorer, but neither helped, and
Microsoft suggested that I try another browser so I installed Firefox (you can download this for free by
clicking here). With Firefox
everything is fine again, but I still can’t log on from my laptop with
IE7. Not that I mind, as I’ve become a
fan of Firefox.
Design Question: should I separate “Soft Links” into “GDB Links” and “Scrapbook”?
We have used the concept of a “Soft Link” to provide a link with other
information. These links may be with
other records in the GDB (duplicates, adoptive relationships, etc), or with
further information about this person (pictures, documents, audio, etc). For example, here is the Soft Links display
for Hannah
OLD’s record: -
There are often both duplicate links, and links to pictures, documents,
and so on. Should this be separated into two tables, “GDB Links” and
“Scrapbook” (or “More information” or “Document
Links”)? In favour of separating this
into two tables: -
·
GDB links and document links “Feel different”. They provide a different type of information, and the link has
different options: for example, the “Compare” command would make little sense
for a document.
·
“GDB Links” and “Scrapbook links” might be easier to understand than
“Soft Links”.
On the other hand
·
It would take up more space on the page.
·
Several days’ effort would be needed to make this change, as the
maintenance and Help pages would also need to be changed.
On balance I think that this change is worth making, but what do you
think? Is there a better name than
“Scrapbook” for the document-type links?
Email
me and let me know what you think.
Regards,
Robert Barnes,
NZGDB Developer