Thursday, November 7, 2002 - Thu, 7 Nov 2002

In the latest Genealogical Computing magazine, Oct-Dec 2002 that I just received, I read an interesting article about genealogy blogging. The article refers mostly to recording your family history research in an online weblog for all to see. I was somewhat familiar with the term blogging (coined from “weB LOGGING”), and I thought about it and decided it would be a good way to motivate myself to push Behold to its release. By getting myself to present my work as I do, I could make sure I stay focused and keep on track. It will also have the added benefit of forcing me to put my thoughts together with regards to the development of Behold, and will allow others to see and comment on what I am doing.

I have done other blogging-type things before. I’ve got My What’s New Page which tracks the changes to my website. I’ve documented the history of my chess program Brute Force. I’ve placed my Genealogical Activities up (although I may integrate that into my Behold Blog). I’ve had conversations with Frank Leister of Reunion many years ago about features needed in a Genealogy program, and that conversation used to be up on a page on my site. And privately, for about 6 months in 2001, I had kept a private time log of what I was working on with Behold, again to motivate me to work on the right things and get it done (and I may integrate those items into my Blog as well - for history’s sake.)

Putting up a Blog (my Behold Blog or Behoblog for short) is also going to necessitate changing my Behold Home Page. I’ve wanted to do this again for some time, since the “announcement” of Behold that is there is one that should have been put up when Behold was just about ready. I thought it was, but there was much more work involved than I expected. So its time to take that down. I want to put up there a feature list and show what is completed and what is left to do. I had done a draft of that page way back in January 2002, but had never got to put it up. So I took a few hours and went through my big “todo” binder for Behold and updated that list and assigned percentage completions to each of the tasks.

I think the items that are now on my Home Page stating what Behold will do for you could then go to a new page of “General Concepts” that are guiding the development for Behold.

Okay. Now I have my current tasks: Set up my Behold Blog page, move the stuff off my Behold main page and restructure it into a new “General Concepts” page, and change the Home Page to reflect the features completed and to do. I’ll sleep on this.