Friday, September 2, 2005 - Fri, 2 Sep 2005

Sorry for the bit of delay in reporting my progress. As I started testing other GEDCOM files, I found two things that I needed to address that weren’t apparent from the one I started with.

First, I found that most GEDCOMs list the events about a person in a somewhat logical order, usually starting with the SEX and then BIRTH and DEATH and NOTEs will follow. But a few do not. It is probably worthwhile to have Behold sort the events into a logical order for display. The extra advantage of this is it can save some lines by appending SEX at the end of the first BIRTH line (in 0.92 I had the printout of SEX turned off by default, and now I won’t have to), and appending all references to level 1 sources about a person on the first line that lists the person’s name. I will also put events with dates before events without dates (i.e. level 1 facts and notes). Behold currently does not “understand” dates, so at this time I cannot put the events in order of date (this will come in Version 2). In the future, I’ll probably add options to allow you to customize the order you want to see the events. I’ve started coding this and its not very much coding, but the logic of moving the linked events around is somewhat complex. I don’t want to take much more time to release this version, so if I can’t get this done quickly, I might leave it for 0.99 or later.

Second, I found that other GEDCOMs often have different level 0 structures that are non-standard. They don’t quite print out well yet the way I have set things up. I’ll have to improve this and at least make it look okay for now.

I want to get these done as soon as possible and get 0.97 out. It’s already taken me much longer than I had hoped, and now I have to change my site to say 0.97 will be out in early September rather than August. Frustrating.

I have been working on Behold while feeling somewhat depressed due to the events following Hurricane Katrina. I was in New Orleans in 1998 for a conference and am mesmerized by what tragedy has befallen the city and its people. I feel somewhat guilty being able to go on with a normal life while a million people cannot. I could not imagine what I’d do if that happened to me and my family.