From Information Aesthetics, I read about Simile, an Ajax widget for timelines. Quite interesting. I’m not sure yet if I’d use it in Beyond — I’ll have to look into it some more — but it’s certainly a possibility.

As far as other updates go, other projects are eating up most of my time right now, but things are progressing (albeit slowly).

It feels like it’s been forever since I last posted. First off, I set up a Basecamp project for me and the other two programmers, which is helping with keeping track of milestones and to-do items. I’m liking it a lot. :)

We’ve also moved the new URL (which we’ll disclose in a week or two when we’re ready for beta testers) to a set of dedicated servers. Which also means that we can use Subversion on them (and we are), rather than on Sourceforge’s servers. I hadn’t used SVN on Mac/Unix before this, but it’s easy and all is going smoothly.

Finally, as far as the actual coding goes, I’ve got most of the user authentication stuff working. (It was a stupid error. :)) I’ve set some ambitious deadlines for each stage of the project — and when we get a little bit further along and I have a more accurate assessment, I’ll make some of those known, particularly the launch deadline — and even so, I’m almost positive we can make it happen.

One last thing: since this is going to be a subscription-based membership (well, most everything will be free, but there’ll be a higher-level pay-per-month membership that’ll help us have the money to deal with growth when/if that happens), I’m not sure yet if the code will be open source. I want to open source it all, but my business sense tells me that’s probably not a good idea. My guess is that we’ll extract parts of the code and open source them. We’ll see. Whatever ends up happening, rest assured that “Don’t Be Evil” is my motto and that I’ll do my best to make it open and as free as possible. I’m not in this for the money. In fact, there was a brief moment when I thought about how rich I could get (assuming this whole thing flies), but it almost instantly sucked out all the energy I had towards working on the project, stopping me dead in my tracks. I can’t do this for money. That’s not how I work. Which is good. :)

Technorati Tags: Beyond, genealogy, Basecamp, Subversion

Got the people list working, along with a few little bits and pieces here and there. It’s time to write out a roadmap and set some deadlines. I’m a lot more comfortable with Ruby on Rails now than I was two weeks ago, and it’s making a huge difference. I love Rails. :) Anyway, I’ve still got to figure out how the linking is going to work — the idea is clear in my head, but I don’t have a clue how the user interface will be. Yet. :)

Back in the mid-1800s, my ancestor Robert Shanks bought and sold a fair amount of land. One name that came up more than once was that of a Mr. Atkinson (I can’t remember his first name), a man who seemed fairly well to do.

Now fast-forward to today. I’m trying to find more information about Robert, but nothing seems to be coming up. If I know that he was somehow connected with Mr. Atkinson (through business transactions, in this case), I could start researching Mr. Atkinson to see if anything shows up. For all I know he could have been Robert’s father-in-law, or perhaps Robert’s family had lived with the Atkinsons for a few years, or Robert and Mr. Atkinson started a business together, or any number of other possibilities.

Now imagine being able to find one of Mr. Atkinson’s descendants, someone who’s been researching that very line and has a wealth of information about Mr. Atkinson, including his journal — which just happens to mention Robert Shanks.

Or pretend your ancestor Humphrey Call had a brother, Josiah, who lived hundreds of miles away from Humphrey and died without ever marrying. You’ve come to a dead-end with their line, but you suspect Josiah may have inherited the family Bible (he was the eldest, after all) and a number of other heirlooms. He wasn’t on speaking terms with Humphrey at his death, though, which is why they’ve disappeared.

Another researcher is working on the line of Michael Indigo, who happened to live in Josiah’s neighborhood. And this researcher finds a bunch of information for the Call family in Michael’s belongings — the family Bible, the love letters of Humphrey and Josiah’s parents, and a number of deeds for the family land. Turns out Michael and Josiah were friends.

So then the researcher adds Josiah Call to Michael Indigo as a friend. You get a message saying someone’s added Josiah Call to the database. You check it out and voila, turns out it’s the same Josiah, and you see that this researcher has a gold mine of records for your ancestors.

That’s the power of including non-family relationships in an interconnected online genealogy network. And that’s just one of the many cool things that Beyond will make possible.

(And just for the record, all of that stuff about Mr. Atkinson was completely made up, other than his name and the fact that he had land transactions with Robert Shanks. And the Call family and Michael Indigo are fictional as far as I know.)

I’ve got a Ruby on Rails prototype of the site almost up. The core stuff works (people and families in the database, navigating between people and families, etc.), and I’m amazed I was able to get that much of it done in a single afternoon. Ruby on Rails rocks. :) At the moment I’m trying to get the login/authentication system working. Hopefully by tomorrow. At this rate, I’ll have a testable beta up long before the end of August. Good. :)

I’m in the midst of sketching out what objects I’m going to need (user, person, family, message, image, relationship, etc.), along with what methods each will have. It’s elucidating. I’ve also started mapping out a URL schema (which will end up being tightly knit with the methods just mentioned).

You know, this time around, everything feels so much easier. Not that I got very far with my previous attempt, but even so, the path is clear where it was dim and murky before. And I can fit the whole thing in my head, which was something I was unable to do before. More importantly, I’m almost 100% sure now that I can do this. The mammoth project is now feasible.

But of course the doubts come flying at me every few days. That’s why I’ve started reading these quotes every day:

You must do the thing you think you cannot do. – Eleanor Roosevelt

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checked by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. – Teddy Roosevelt

It makes a huge difference. :)

Here’s a sneak peek at what Beyond is morphing into:

(Just a mockup, by the way. We’re not quite that far yet, nor is this necessarily going to be the final graphic design for the site. :))

Technorati Tags: Beyond, genealogy

This changes everything.

Tim’s comment about a “Flickr for genealogy” has sparked a flurry of thoughts in my head, and here’s what I’ve decided.

1. Web all the way. Meaning, to pull this off, it has to be a child of the Web, not a desktop app that happens to be on the web. Think social networking. That’s going to be the focus, not so much the data. (But don’t worry, the data will still be important.)

2. Simple. While being able to store anything and everything is a noble ideal, I think it’s only going to work (at this stage) if the fields are set (the core data), with expandable metadata later on.

3. Low barrier to entry. It has to be really easy to sign in and get started. To host this, we come to…

4. A startup. I never really thought I’d do this, but I think it’s time to create a startup to host Beyond. It’s going to be a service rather than a software package. (For now, that is. Later on I’ll wrap the software into an install-on-your-own-server deal, but that’s secondary.) Time to figure out a good business model…

5. Web 2.0. Kind of in line with #1, Beyond will now be even more part of the Web 2.0 paradigm. For example, individuals and families will have permalinks, so that you can tell people about them. You’ll be able to share whatever parts of your family tree you want to. There’ll be a simple blog built-in (to function as a research log, basically), but you’ll also be able to pull in an RSS feed from your existing blog instead if you want, and you’ll be able to post to your blog directly from Beyond (via the various blogging APIs). There’ll be tags, watchlists (RSS feeds, that is), comments (on individuals, families, your profile, etc.), the works.

6. Community. I think a lot of the stuff in #5 will help with this. As for linking people together, I’m thinking about something along the lines of LibraryThing’s “works.” Basically, you have John Doe born in 1801, and user B has a John Doe born in 1801, and the system automatically picks them up as a possible match. You can say, “My John Doe is the same as user B’s John Doe.” And it’ll keep track of how many people say so-and-so is the same as so-and-so. I haven’t figured out all the logistics yet, but this seems like the right way to go. And I hesitate to have the system actually match anyone together; I’d rather leave the logistics of that to the humans.

7. Share. So far I’ve been in the genealogy-is-private mindset, but I think I’ve finally gotten rid of that. In this new world, it’s about sharing. Sure, you’ll be able to mark your data private if you want, but the default will be to share, share, share.

8. People, not pedigree. Up till now, my mindset has been that there’s this structure out there — a pedigree — and you make people fit into the pedigree. It doesn’t always work, though, because people got remarried, etc. When looking at Flickr last night for inspiration, however, I realized that there’s a better way to go about it. (Well, I think it’s better. Only time and a prototype will tell. :)) Individuals are like photos, and families are like groups. Instead of putting things into pedigrees, you add individuals (like adding photos), and then you can sort them into families (like putting photos into groups or sets, with predefined roles like “father,” “mother,” “child”). To link generations together, you just put the linking person into both families. (For example, Hoover Macgillicuddy is the father of Family A. His parents are Wilford and Maretta Pinegar, who are in Family B. You just have to add Hoover as a child in Family B.) And it’ll automatically stitch together the pedigree for you. What this means is that you won’t be doing most of your work from the pedigree. Instead, you’ll work from the individual and group lists (using browse and search). It’s different, to be sure, but I’ve got a gut feeling that it’s a good change. We’ll see.

9. A deadline. I’ve got a feeling that I can make this happen by the end of August. I don’t know yet if that’s utter madness or not, but heck, there’s a rumor floating around that Flickr went up two weeks after the initial idea. If they can do it, so can I. (And if the rumor’s false, well, that’s not going to stop me. :))

10. A name. Somebody’s already got www.beyondproject.com. I do rather like the name Beyond, so it’s time to come up with some variation with a dot-com ending (kind of like how Backpack is at www.backpackit.com). Hmm…

Technorati Tags: Beyond, Flickr, LibraryThing, Backpack