BenCrowder.net

Ran across a genealogy/Google Maps mashup today. That got me thinking about maps. The key about maps as far as genealogy goes is that things change over time. Boundaries move back and forth -- just look at Alsace-Lorraine! -- and using a modern map isn't always ...

I got a PowerMac G4 at work today. It's old, sure, but it's running Tiger and has the latest Xcode, which means I'll be able to develop the OS X client in parallel (in Python with PyCocoa, I think). I'll still focus on the web client (which I've dubbed ...

Installing Subversion on Bluehost (a shared host) looks like it'll be difficult, at least until they offer it officially, so I've decided to register on SourceForge and use their servers instead. It takes up to two business days for them to process it, assuming that it gets approved. ...

Here they are: I'm still not sure yet what I think of this idea. There are clear advantages in the ...

Yesterday I came up with an idea for encouraging people to enter sources: Namely, grey out information that doesn't yet have a source. For me personally, something like this would certainly make me want to bring all my information ...

Here are some quick mockups I threw together for the lightbox ala-Expose feature: I read 37signals' Getting Real last week, and it's ...

Yesterday I was thinking about genealogical interchange formats, because Beyond will need to send diffs back and forth (between the server and client). GEDCOM is the current standard, but it's old (the specification was written in 1996). Enter XML. It's flexible, very well-supported, and it's nice ...

The site has moved to www.beyondproject.org. The old URL still works, but I recommend moving to the new one. :) Anyway, I just finished finals and am starting to delve into Ruby on Rails. More to come... [tags]Ruby on Rails[/tags]

This morning I discovered Pixoh, an online photo editor. Quite cool. But what it made me think of was this: a similar kind of site but for genealogy. It'd be the Beyond web client but allow you to open a local file from your hard drive ...

[I wrote this up in Writely this afternoon, and it's proven to be a good consolidation of the various thoughts I've had. Feel free to leave comments. As for why it's a "proposal," I have to get the project approved by the advisory committee in order to be ...