Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog     The Behold User Forum

Before the first Alpha of Behold came out in March 2005, I had a survey up which you can still see at archive.org. (Don't you just love the color I used to use?) Between 1997 and 2004, 685 of the people who filled in that survey said "Yes" to the question "Does the concept of a program like Behold interest ...

Since the Version 0.99.7 release a few days ago, I have been trying to set up the Newsletter again. That died even before I switched web hosts, because the mailings started canning out after about 500 were sent. I needed something more robust, and after the change to a PHP/MySQL backend on the new Behold ...

I'm always up for a challenge, and I've always enjoyed the challenge of a GEDCOM torture test. Most Genealogy programs claim they have no limits, but eventually every program will run out of something -array capacity, memory or time or maybe it just wasn't written to handle a certain type of complexity. So I ...

When I virtualized the Everything Report, I created one routine to write out the various parts of the report. It could send the results various places: to the Report itself, to the HTML export, to the Rich Text File export, or into plain text for the purpose of simple searching. So I figured I could reuse ...

There was another feature I used to have in Behold that just has been knawing at me. It actually is important that it be put back in now while the time is ripe. Basically, when Behold reads a GEDCOM, it may find problems with the GEDCOM file. I've now added the listing of the problems to the file ...

I've written this blog on a regular basis for many years. I'm not really sure who the audience is, since we're talking not about just genealogy, or genealogy software, but programming and all that I'm involved in regarding Behold. So it's really nice when someone else can write up what my blog is about even ...

I decided it was important at this juncture to change the data structure to include the GEDCOM data exactly as it is in the file and to change the structure from lines-based to records-based. Previously I had taken some shortcuts and internally modified some of the GEDCOM lines to make processing easier later. ...

What I'm working towards in these first few Betas is Behold's stability. By that, I mean Behold should never crash. It should not result in a system error that prevents Behold from continuing which may require you open Windows Task Manager to stop it. These system errors are called "exceptions". The last ...

Only 8 days later, but a new version was needed for a couple of important fixes: Scrolling should now all work properly without errors. And users signing up with a user name of 5 or fewer characters no longer will get an error when trying to enter it into the Info box in Behold. I also had problems ...

Ah, the CONC tag. It stands for Concatenate the line. It is put in a GEDCOM file to split a long line. For example: 2 NOTE This is a note that is sp 3 CONC lit on two lines. The note will be put together and the word "split" will be reformed as one word. That is the way it is clearly defined in GEDCOM. ...