Tuell.Net

OK, it would be more accurate to say, "So many distractions; too little time." Kathy and I seem to tumble out of hectic work weeks into weekends consumed with the usual distractions — yard work, home maintenance, laundry, grocery shopping — while still trying to find time to pursue personal projects such as this website.

That sounds pretty whiney, doesn't it? I suppose a lot of us have day jobs that suck the life right out of us, and we're all tempted to grab a jar of picante sauce and a bag of tortilla chips and vegetate in front of a 60-inch flat screen. But I think we can all agree that, unless you're retired, weekends are way too short.

This has been a maintenance weekend as far as Tuell.Net goes. Nothing visible, but a lot of under-the-hood updating. The site is driven by CMS (content management system) software, which simply means pages are built on the fly with content stored in databases rather than than a collection of HTML documents linked together. Here, there are three applications dovetailed together — the main CMS that provides the structure, a photo gallery application for photo archives, and a genealogy application that contains all the data on 3,000-plus ancestors.

They usually play nice, though user registration can get a little tricky.

A continuing project has been linking Google maps to places associated with ancestors (see The Catacombs area). This is a really cool feature, but it must be done one person at a time — and there are more than a thousand ancestors to go. Where photos exist, we're also linking those to individuals.

Simultaneously, we are plodding through the desktop software we use for research, Family Tree Maker, to reconnect the hundreds of linked media that became scrambled during a merge of two database files. So bear with us. We don't want to get in a rush and spill picante sauce in the keyboard.

— Tom Tuell