User talk:Tdoyle

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New Site

Hi Tim...saw your page...looks really good..i can see i will have to do a little work to tell the story of my family...still working on the Canadian Whitneys but pretty much done....

I love the site...just learning how to get around it...not quite sure of everything yet

thanks so much for all of your hard work and Robert Wards....

Eleanore Dilello

Importing Pierce

Tim: O.K., I can see that importing Pierce is something you can do programmatically without much difficulty. There is a point which I want to discuss, however. In order for the name index to work well, I have been adding <a name="C____"> tags in front of every child, not just the ones whose families are continued on a later page. I have done this as I was editing the pages for other reasons, so the coverage is spotty. I think we should have such anchors in place. Probably that is something you can also do programmatically.

The importing of Phoenix will be a bit different, since every page of Phoenix consists of a table, not preformatted text. Possibly you can deal with that, too, but it won't be the same, and it is hard for me to foresee what difficulties may arise, if any.

Actually, I would prefer to change all the pages in the Phoenix transcription to look more like the original, but am unsure how to accomplish that. In the original, there is a thin-line border around the entire page. Within that border, each page is divided into six sections, in a two-row, three-column format, each section divided from the others by thin lines. It's sort of like this:

      ------------------------------------
     | A  |            B             | C  |
      ------------------------------------
     |    |                          |    |
     |    |                          |    |
     |    |                          |    |
     |    |                          |    |
     | D  |            E             | F  |
     |    |                          |    |
     |    |                          |    |
     |    |                          |    |
     |    |                          |    |
     |    |                          |    |
      ------------------------------------

Section E contains all the text, includeing footnotes. Section D contains the numbers referring to the individuals immediately to the right in section E, and section F contains numbers referring to the oldest child of the person immediately to the left in section E, or, in the case of a family header, the number of the parent. On odd numbered pages, A is blank, B contains Whitney Family. centered, and C contains the page number. On even numbered pages, A contains the page number, B contains Sixth Generation. (or its analogue), and C is blank.

Part of my hang-up is that I don't know how to get a table to use thin (one pixel wide?) borders and dividing lines.

In actuality, I didn't faithfully reproduce sections A, B, and C, and just put the page number like "[p. 344]" at the beginning of the page. I did my best with sections D, E, and F, and they came out pretty well.

Whatever you could suggest to improve the faithfulness of the new versions would be most appreciated.

Robert 10:05, 25 January 2006 (CST)

Phoenix Format

Tim: That's a good start! Now you have to eliminate the horizontal lines dividing parts D, E, and F into rows, without eliminating the two vertical lines splitting D from E from F. There should be just three horizontal lines altogether: at the very top and bottom, and just after the first row containing A, B, and C. Furthermore, the "p. " part of the page number should go away, and the "Whitney Family" should be in italics, not bold, and followed by a period. And, of course, the numbers in section F must be links to anchors on other pages. And the numbers should have valign=top, and those in section D should have align=right.

Question: Should the entire transcriptions, both of them, be made so that there is one page of each book per web page, rather than five?

Robert 10:52, 25 January 2006 (CST)

Miscellaneous Issues

Tim:

• Rather than use each other's User_talk: pages, what do you think of a sysop bulletin board page where questions and answers can be interleaved? Then the issue would evaporate.
• Since it doesn't matter to you, I think I prefer Archive: instead of Main: for those pages. Hence the change I made.
• Phoenix format: If you can't put bars between D and E and E and F, then leaving that blank would be an acceptable solution, although imperfect.
• John Whitney Family is a reasonable name. Thanks for taking care of that.
• I understand now what you were trying to do. I like this way better.

Robert 15:10, 27 January 2006 (CST)

Phoenix Template

Tim: I had an idea about the Phoenix template. Check out the WRG:Sandbox and see what you think. I'm sure you can play with the spacing of the header and body to match better than I have done.

Robert 05:47, 28 January 2006 (CST)

High Priority

Tim: In my opinion, the highest priority task left is to establish what guidelines or standards or templates we are going to use for footnoting or citations. This is listed as "Citations" at the Website Conversion Project page. Please move that task to the top of the list. It very definitely should be decided before we open the page to the world.

Next from your list in order of priority would be "Page Creation", then "Quick Start Guide", then "Help Files". After that, we should be good to go.

Robert 20:23, 29 January 2006 (CST)

U.S.S. Constitution

I don't know what to do about importing this page. It is very much a side issue compared to the other pages.

Robert 20:29, 29 January 2006 (CST)

Pages with Many Photos

Each Reunion has a page of snapshots which have many images. I'm in no rush to import them. Unique naming of the images is an issue. You did well on the Heraldry page, but I'm not sure I'd have called one of the images "Benjamin.jpg", as that name is probably not specific enough.

Robert 20:37, 29 January 2006 (CST)

FTP

Tim: Yes, the permissions were the problem. I tried to upload to the main directory, and it worked, but I deleted the partial upload because I had already e-mailed the file to you and it was 3/4 of the way through the send process. So look for it in your e-mail in a few minutes.

- Robert 18:32, 3 February 2006 (CST)

My Database

Tim: A few issues, indeed! The reference numbers need to be separated by commas. Of course there are issues of missing spaces. Also, the fact that Elinor had three versions of her given name, and therefore also three versions of her married name, is a problem. I don't know how to deal with that. I could suppress the export of married names if that would help.

- Robert 21:28, 3 February 2006 (CST)

Announcement

Tim: O.K., announcing is now timely. There is one feature I think we ought to add, but I'm very unsure where. That would be a link to your and my User_talk pages, so that people can ask questions and get answers that they either can't find in the Help pages, or which are not covered by them (or which they are too lazy to find for themselves). Sometimes there is no substitute for talking to a real person. Thoughts?

- Robert 12:50, 5 February 2006 (CST)

Phoenix Template

Tim: By George, I think I've got it! See the WRG:Sandbox.

- Robert 12:50, 5 February 2006 (CST)

Thanks for the message

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the message about Charles M. Whitney. I got too tired last night before I could get what we know about him online. We have information about his later life, but the beginnings are sketchy. I have managed to track him down in 1860 - he's a lawyer in Troy, NY. Beyond that, I am having difficulty finding his parents.

You said you had a list from ancestry of 9 Charles Whitneys from this time period - would you mind sending it to me, as I don't have an ancestry subscription?

I've been working through the 1850 census from Heritage Quest, but have eliminated most of the Charles Whitneys that I can find. The one other clue we have is that his son, Charles F., had an 'A.J. Whitney' in his personal notebook. My father-in-law remembers hearing about an 'Uncle AJ', as well. We believe that this is Alonzo J. Whitney, who married Melissa J. Rice. I've managed to find marriage records for Alonzo, who is the son of Jacob and Sally Whitney of MA. Unfortunately, though I found Alonzo J. living at home in the 1850 census, an older brother Charles was not in the household. The same household in 1840 did have an older son living with them, but - of course - no name.

Thanks for telling me your hunch - I'll go look at James and Emma of Fitchburg and see what I can turn up. :)

-Stacy

PS - Is there any way to change the title of a document? I put in one of the families without the "Family:" as the first thing in the title. (Oops - in looking up the document in my lineage, I see you've already changed it. However, could I have changed it somehow, or is that an admin thing? Thanks.)