Wednesday, May 27, 2009

First Look at WorldHistory.com - Post 2

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I posted about my first look at the new web site, http://www.worldhistory.com/, in Post 1 of this series. This post described the site pages that an unregistered user would see. I also posted a link to the WorldHistory short demo videos. I believe that this web site is still under development, so some of the features don't work well or even at all.

Notwithstanding that, it is useful to go explore what a registered user can do.
In this post I want to start exploring the web site from the registered users point of view. I registered some time ago, and uploaded a GEDCOM file.

Here is the "My Profile" page with my short biography, my picture, my web site, my tags, etc. as submitted:


As a registered user, I wondered what the options for adding content were. I clicked on the "Add content" link at the top of the page and saw:




There are quite a few options here. I'll have to explore it a bit more later.

Since I had uploaded a GEDCOM file some time ago, I clicked on the "Ancestors" link in the menu row below the Search box. The page below tells me how many persons I have in my database on the site and what I can do with them. There is a link to the Map which I'm going to resist in this post, but will deal with in the next post.

Below the text and map, there is an alphabet list for the surnames in my database.



I clicked on the S item and got the first page (of at least 30 pages) of S surnames. I clicked along until I found my grandfather, Frederick Walton Seaver (1876-1942) on page 10:


I clicked on the link for him, and was able to cut and paste a "biography" into the "About Them" field as shown below:


When that was done, I clicked on "Save New Record" and this page with a map of Leominster, Massachusetts and the biography of my grandfather appeared:



Okay, that's pretty cool. The GEDCOM that I uploaded had this biography in the Notes. Why didn't my Notes go into the biography field when the GEDCOM uploaded? And the site has lost track of the days and months for birth and death. It lists only the years and places.

Scrolling down, I see that I can add Events to this biography, can link to People in their Life, can add Sources and Stories, Artifacts, and Related Projects:


My GEDCOM had Facts for events in his life. And it had the parents, spouse and children for him. Why don't they show up here as "People in their Life?"

Maybe I have the cart before the horse here, and should be patient with the web site. Maybe they want me to attach a Father and Mother (but where is the Spouse(s) and Children links?)? I clicked on the "Add Father" icon and was rewarded with:



Oops - an error message. They obviously have more work to do on the links to family members.

In the next post in this series, we'll look at a Search for a person, and also check out the Maps a bit.

Note that reader "Geolover" had some critical comments about this site in my first post.

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