If you are a dreamer, come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer… If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire For we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in! -— Shel Silverstein, “Where the Sidewalk Ends”
Site title taken from poem The Spider and the Fly, by Mary Howitt (1799–1888), published 1829. Read the complete poem.This site has undergone several iterations:
- a very primitive HTML site that I built when Methuselah was a baby
- a WordPress re-creation using a page builder which shall remain nameless
- this latest version is a combination of HTML and PHP (I really don't know PHP, just enough to be dangerous)
I enjoyed working with the page builder -- it could do lots of neato stuff -- but it got too big for its britches and when it "strongly" recommended backing up everything before upgrading, I could read the writing on the wall.
The time had come to ditch it. I began by converting it to the new WordPress default editor (also called Gutenberg editor). I had recently converted a site that I manage for my rug hooking group and figured I was up for doing it with mine.
Wrong! I quickly realized that it would be much easier converting it to regular old HTML outside WordPress. And that's what I ended up doing.
For now I am happy with it. However I may never get it to a state where I am happy with it longer than a few weeks, because there is always something that needs fixing, improving, changing, updating, or just general tweaking. You get the picture.
My first task was to get the genealogy section up and running. I am using server-side genealogy software (TNG) that seems to do what I need it to do - i.e. be a container for genealogy data that I maintain locally in a desktop genealogy program called Family Tree, and then upload to this website. There are four trees in our genealogical forest:
- Rowsell/Anstey (Newfoundland)
- Field/Taylor (Newfoundland)
- Elliott/McDermid (Ontario/Quebec/Scotland)
- Joseph/Kirby (Antigua)
If when viewing the genealogy data you find something wrong or missing, please do let me know by clicking on my name at the bottom of the TNG page.
I owe my long-suffering, patient husband more than I can ever express, much less pay back, for helping me learn new versions of HTML that I didn't even know existed until this May 2022. I used to pride myself on my ability to pick up new skills quickly. But I have been both humbled and excited by Flexbox. Let's leave it at that.