Back in November I mentioned my idea for a lightweight record manager, and here’s a mockup of what I think it’ll look like:

It’ll be very, very simple. Basically, there’ll be a small set of metadata for each person (the name, gender, and birthdate, as you can see in its own box), and then a wiki page where the user can enter whatever they want. It’ll use Textile for the editing (and to edit, you’ll just click on the wiki area, I think). There’ll be a modification to link to other people in the database (the green links) and to non-people pages (the red Anson County link). Other than that and a basic search, the only other feature (for now) will be the history tab, which keeps track of revisions.

And that’s it. It won’t take too long to put together, really. I’m not going to worry about GEDCOM import or pedigree charts or anything just yet — I’ll stick with the bare minimum, to ensure that this actually happens. :) The idea is to let the user organize their data the way they want to. To get out of the way, in other words. Not everyone wants that, of course, but I think it has the potential to be a very good thing. We’ll see if I’m right. :)

Oh, I upgraded to Rails 1.2 earlier but it didn’t work for some reason, so I’m reinstalling and hoping that it’ll decide to cooperate. If not, I may write the prototype in Python/Django instead.

As for the name, I figured I can’t keep calling everything Beyond. :)

Technorati Tags: Beyond, genealogy, family history

I wasn’t able to make it to the LDS tech talk session a few weeks ago, but Dan Hanks recently blogged about it, and I really wish I’d gone.

The church is also now in the design stages of a new open-source personal record manager that will interface with the new system and will perhaps take the role that PAF plays now.

Very good. It looks like they’ll be writing it in Java (or something similar), which is really quite a pity, but at least it’ll be something. (If only they’d realize how much better Ruby and Python and Perl are. ~sigh~) It’ll be a while before anything comes of this, though — several months at the very least. But since it’ll be open-source, with any luck they’ll keep it open from the beginning so that people can use it as it develops, rather than having to wait until a release.

Anyway, people keep asking me how my “PAF for Mac” (as this project originally started) is coming along, and it’s always disappointing to have to tell them it’s in suspended animation. But hopefully not for long! (And yes, I realize I keep saying that, but someday it’s really going to change. :))

Technorati Tags: LDS, PAF, genealogy, family history

Nothing new to report, other than that school and other endeavors are keeping me busy. I’m still itching at the bit to write a simple web app that will help me keep track of my research, though. I’ve already created most of it in my head, watching the outlines start to become solid, so it shouldn’t be too hard. All I need is time. Anyway, while it’s unfortunately taking a long time, hopefully we’ll see some real, usable stuff coming out of this before long. I’ll try to make it more of a priority. :)