One of my friends mentioned today that she’d like a Google Docs for genealogy — you know, like a spreadsheet or a document but instead it would be a pedigree. And I thought of Beyond. And I thought, “Gee, I wish I had time and energy to do it.” Because still, nobody’s done it — not done right, at any rate. And when it is done right, it’ll be big. Huge. Phenomenal. Genealogy is one of the most popular hobbies out there.

I don’t think I’ll be the one to pull it off, though. I’m still rather burned out from programming and I don’t see myself starting a massive project like this anytime soon. But I do plan to continue writing on here occasionally, and I hope with all my heart that someone will take the cream of the crop of these ideas here and create something truly beautiful — the Google Docs or Flickr of the genealogy world. I want to be wowed. I want to be thunderstruck. I want to be moved to tears. (Well, perhaps I’m overdramatizing a bit here, but we’ve still got a long way to go.)

Graduation is next month. Beyond is on the back burner. I’m hoping that after I graduate I’ll have time (and energy and desire) to make something happen. I’m getting rather burned out with programming, though, so there’s no guarantee. Anyway, I’m alive. The end. :)

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. :)

The e-mails and comments I’ve gotten over the past week or so have resurrected my resolve to make Beyond a reality. After all, I do have free time; it’s just a matter of deciding how I spend it. And while making books is all well and good, I think Beyond probably deserves a higher priority.

That said, I’m now trying to figure out just what Beyond will be. There are a few problems that need solving, particularly collaboration, visualization, and user interfaces. I think I’ll focus on those. Stretching myself too thin — like butter on too much bread — will be bad.

What do I expect to come out of this? I do hope that my work here will result in a usable web app that I can use to do my genealogy, but I still see myself more as an R&D lab. If developers want to take these ideas and run with them, I’d be ecstatic. (Assuming the ideas are good, that is. :)) And yet I’m rather interested in writing a minimalist genealogy app as well. So we’ll see what happens.

I have an idea for a way to link families together, in a more user-friendly way, but it’s still in the works and I’m at my parents’ home so I don’t have access to Photoshop right now (and I won’t use MS Paint!), so suffice it to say that it’s kind of like organizing Flickr sets — people at the bottom, drag and drop into families or whatever kinds of relationships you want. (I’m still a firm believer that the new generation of genealogy apps needs to handle non-family relationships — friends, employers, debtors, whatever.)

I feel kind of tacky asking for continued comments and e-mails, but they really do make a difference. It’s probably part of being human. :)

Technorati Tags: genealogy, family history

Looking at how things are going right now, it’s probably unlikely that Beyond will materialize into any real app in the near future. Next semester is my last and will be jam-packed with classes I need to graduate, so I doubt I’ll have much free time to work on it. But maybe I will. We’ll see. I really do hope I can come up with something soon, so I can have a place to work on my genealogy without resorting to PCs, but it may have to wait till after I graduate in April.

For those who are interested in seeing this progress, though, keep the e-mails and comments coming. It helps me stay motivated. :)

Whoa, where’d the spike in readers come from? Feedburner reported 27 yesterday and then today it somehow jumped to 40. Not that I mind, of course. :) And I finally have something to say again, after the somewhat long break.

What I feel I need in my own research, at least as an interim solution for now, is this: a (very) lightweight system which lets me capture everything and gets out of my way. What I have in mind is Beast, but for genealogy:

Not only is the design nice and clean, but their goal is 500 lines of code. And that’s a good thing, I think, because it forces you to rethink how you do a lot of things.

What does this mean for genealogy? What’s the bare minimum? I’ve thought about it a bit and I think the easiest way to pull this off would be to store the data in a wiki. Markdown or Textile would make editing very easy, and the database would be extremely simple (id, name, and wiki page). Rather than linking people in the database, it would use specialized HTML links.

This kind of a slimmed-down app would obviously not have much in the way of visualization or analysis, but that’s okay — at this point I just need something to store my research in. Nor would I need it to be a multi-user app, at least not yet — that can wait. Bare minimum, no more.

The best part is that all of this fat-trimming makes the app much easier to write. (Granted, fitting it all into a few hundred lines of code won’t exactly be kid’s play, but the less functionality there is, the easier it is to reach completion.) This is something I might actually be able to pull off with my hectic schedule. The geek in me wants to hack it all together in a single weekend. We’ll see. :)

By way of clarification, I don’t mean that the ultimate be-all, end-all of genealogy will be written in less than 1,000 lines of code, of course. But I do think that a Beastly app will be a nice, clean solution for the time being, and I need a nice, clean app if I’m to want to do my genealogy in it. Psychological satisfaction is important.

In the meantime, a semi-usable hack would be to use a combination of Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Backpack. Or install some wiki software. Speaking of which, one might ask why on earth I’d bother with creating a new system when I could easily just use a pre-existing wiki package like MediaWiki. I’m still not entirely sure, but the lightweight factor is the most appealing part of this project for me. I need something small. No bloat.

Technorati Tags: genealogy, Markdown, Textile, Beast, Google, Backpack

In this short drought of posts, I point you to Hilton’s new blog, Enabling the Distributed Family Tree. It’s for his master’s thesis, and here’s the proposal abstract:

While there is a large amount of genealogical data available on the Internet today, most of it is only found in isolated pockets. This causes genealogists difficulty when they try to locate pertinent information, and is often the cause of duplicated research efforts and paralyzing dead-ends. The objective of this thesis is to help overcome these encumbrances through the creation of a universally shared family tree that is distributed, open, scalable, extensible, standards-based, and machine-understandable. We will accomplish this through the specification of a data model and protocol for communications; the development of conformant server and client software; and the use of a natural language search interface, real-time data extraction of Web content, and semi-automatic lineage linkage to drive content expansion.

And I’ll let you read more about it on his blog. :)

Things are rather busy over here, but I’ll soon have more time to start writing again. In the meantime, enjoy working on your genealogy. ;)

Over the past few months, a number of people have e-mailed me about helping out with Beyond. I’m grateful for all the interest. :) And because I’d hate to see it disappear — there are still many apps to be written! — I’ve created the BeyondGen group over at Google Groups. Quoting from my initial post to the group:

As far as my vision for this group goes, I see it as a place to talk about things like genealogy data models, good UI ideas, interoperability, new software and sites, and so on. And, most importantly, the future.

Hopefully this can spur on more and better development, and get more of an exchange of ideas going around. :)

See you on the list!