BenCrowder.net

Beyond is changing. In a sentence, I'm too busy and so I'm going to withdraw from managing/writing Beyond as a social network or online record manager, and instead I'm going to turn this blog into a genealogy think tank of sorts. With everything else I've got going on right now, ...

Yesterday morning I was thinking about sparklines and how they might be used in genealogy, and after a few quick sketches I came up with this: Here's how it works for individuals: the first black dot is their birth. Each pixel is one year. ...

It's been a while, eh. No, Beyond is not dead -- she's just asleep for a little while. A number of other projects are keeping me exceedingly busy at the moment, but most of them will be over by the end of August. I wish things could ...

From Information Aesthetics, I read about Simile, an Ajax widget for timelines. Quite interesting. I'm not sure yet if I'd use it in Beyond -- I'll have to look into it some more -- but it's certainly a possibility. As far as other updates go, other projects ...

It feels like it's been forever since I last posted. First off, I set up a Basecamp project for me and the other two programmers, which is helping with keeping track of milestones and to-do items. I'm liking it a lot. :) We've also moved the new URL (which ...

Got the people list working, along with a few little bits and pieces here and there. It's time to write out a roadmap and set some deadlines. I'm a lot more comfortable with Ruby on Rails now than I was two weeks ago, and it's making a huge ...

Back in the mid-1800s, my ancestor Robert Shanks bought and sold a fair amount of land. One name that came up more than once was that of a Mr. Atkinson (I can't remember his first name), a man who seemed fairly well to do. Now fast-forward to today. I'm ...

I've got a Ruby on Rails prototype of the site almost up. The core stuff works (people and families in the database, navigating between people and families, etc.), and I'm amazed I was able to get that much of it done in a single afternoon. Ruby on Rails ...

I'm in the midst of sketching out what objects I'm going to need (user, person, family, message, image, relationship, etc.), along with what methods each will have. It's elucidating. I've also started mapping out a URL schema (which will end up being tightly knit with the methods just ...

Here's a sneak peek at what Beyond is morphing into: (Just a mockup, by the way. We're not quite that far yet, nor is this necessarily going to be the final graphic design for the site. :)) [tags]Beyond, genealogy[/tags]