Quiet around here
The IT Skeptic has been quiet for a while. I've been programming. Dunno about you but when I'm cutting code it consumes me: nothing else gets done until I've got it working.
"It" is a family records site for my extended family, with working HTML-based family tree, done in PHP. Great fun.
It still isn't working, but guilt over the Skeptic's silence has won out over passion for code, so a new blog entry is in the works....
Made in New Zealand 
Comments
Have you tried myfamily.com?
Just wondering if you had tried myfamily.com?
I posted on this topic a while back and have been looking for users of this service to share their experiences.
Keep up the great work on your blog- especially the ITIL-CMDB posts.
We're wandering off topic, but...
I've seen myfamily. There are a number of others too. I think this one looks good.
I'm enjoying the challenge of coming up with something a little different (and I hope better). I plan to charge for it too. I think you are right that the big players (Google, Fox, MSN ...) will eat this space, but maybe there is room for a niche player for a bit longer.
P.S. "sitting out a non-compete, raising two kids, drinking some great wine"?? Man I thought I have a good life...
Genealogy software
interesting. I'm the family genealogist myself. One thing I've wanted to do is more effectively combine old photographs with genealogy and I have some ideas for an open source project. Basic idea would be to support the hyperlinking of GIF or JPEG zones to the personal records, so that if you click on Great Aunt Margie's face in that huge family gathering picture taken in 1940 it goes to her entry.
Charlie
I can do that
...using The Gimp to make html maps. See here http://www.corepractice.org/: check out the "Navigating CoPr" image on the left column.
The CMS I use (Drupal) stores an image as a "node" or entity in its own right. I have bult a modification to the taxonomy system so each person in the family tree and each place is automatically a taxonomy term, so they can be used to associate anything. So if I query "Uncle Jim" i get all images, documents, places, stories and other people linked to him in one result. Likewise if I query "11 Neika Avenue". I've also built a Source manager that links any data to its source (document, story, transcribed interview, web link ...) and tracks the authority level of that source and hence the overall authority level for the data on a person.
Right now I'm building the people engine: i.e. a CMDB of people hahahaha. Birth parents, legal parents, couples, life events, attributes ....
Then I'll build a family tree viewer/walker.
Cool eh?
CMDB of people?
But..can you use this for impact analysis? else this is not a true CMDB, just an inventory of people. :-)
Actually, I had something more robust in mind
What I started to build at one point was a database-driven framework to support the following use case:
1. Upload picture
2. Select individual face on picture
3. Associate from picklist of individuals in family tree
4. Repeat 2 and 3 for all faces on the picture
5. Repeat for another picture
The picture, zones, and inviduals would all be stored in a database. This way reports could be run:
1. Show all pictures containing a given individual (sort the pictures chronogically to see the invidual's changing appearance wih time)
2. Show all individuals in a given picture
Yes, it can be done manually as you suggest, but too tedious for end users. I wanted to empower people to do this simply.
-charlie