* Publishing to a CD

[mezentia]

I’m in the process of analysing over 2000 mentions of one of my line of relatives in New Zealand newspapers. I’m using Microsoft’s OneNote application at the moment as it’s a good tool for organising unstructured data. Rather than just analysing the mentions by people mentioned, I’m actually doing it by subject topic, e.g. Social, Cultural, Legal (defendant, plaintif, witness, expert witness) committees, meetings, etc., as I think this way gives a better understanding of the family's roles in their new surroundings, and how they coped with living so far from their birthplace.

I want to be able to access the information through a Web interface, so that a user can click on a topic and see who is mentioned, and in which newspapers, and be able to “drill down” to the actual newspaper report either as a full page image, a clipping, or where relevant, a transcript. Alternatively, they should be able to click on an individual’s name and see where they get a mention, with the same “drill down” capabilities.
I have already created a CD version of my tree via FH, and hand crafted quite a number of additional pages using the same style sheet to cover aspects of my research, for example, many of my family were conrn millers, so I have pages that relate to the mills where they worked. I'd like to include the new newspaper information and search functionality in my existing web pages if at all possible.

I have practically no experience of web design at this level so would welcome some practical advice on how best to present this information via a web interface. I also want this to run from a CD/DVD without any pre-requisites on someone else’s PC. I could create an Access database application if necessary to sit behind my web pages.

I'd appreciate any suggestions on how best to proceed.

Thanks

David


ID:5511

[tatewise]

In order to get started I suggest you gain experience with your existing CD version.
Presumably you know that when you run the CD version, either from the CD itself, or from the FH PublicFH CD folder, then it opens in your default web browser.
This is because the FH CD is already a web design, and should run on any PC (Windows, MacOS, Unix, etc) without pre-requisites.

To create an almost identical Website version, use the Internet > Create a Website command.
All you have to do to get this on the Internet is to upload the files to some web space that you can access.
For example, your Broadband Service Provider will probably offer some free web space as part of your account.
Just visit their home page and look for details about free web space and upload techniques.
Having mastered these basics, you might then want to buy your own web space known as a Domain.
Post back here when you want to make the next steps.

There are some useful insights in the Knowledge Base:
Make a Family Tree CD or Website at
http://www.fhug.org.uk/wiki/doku.php?id ... amily_tree
Upload Web Pages (How To) at
http://www.fhug.org.uk/wiki/doku.php?id ... on_the_web

[Jane]

If you want to run from a CD, you will really be limited to static pages, if you don't want any software other than a browser.

So you will really need to generate the pages from some sort of product.

Had you considered creating an extra Project and adding the 'mentions' as Sources, you could then have custom attributes for the different subject titles and FH could produce individual summary reports for each person with links to the relevant documents.

[mezentia]

Thanks for your thoughts.

I had really hoped to be able to create a CD/DVD that would run with just a web browser and no other software. However, it seems that can't be done. To provide the search functionality I want is going to require some database software sitting in the background, and this implies that I host my site externally with something like PHPGedView or TNG, which I'm not prepared to do.

I've had some experience in developing applications using Access, so I'll probably develop a database to hold details of newspapers, people, subjects, mentions, etc, and put this on the CD with access runtime (free!) that anyone who gets the CD can install. Getting a browser interface to Access might be a challenge tho'!