GEDCOM
I was doing some idle research into automated family-tree generation, wondering whether it'd be worth someone using pre-existing software to maintain a (somewhat lagging) database of births, marriages and deaths, which could be used to generate a nice family-tree image every so often, and uploaded somewhere.
And then I tripped and fell into the terrifying world of online genealogy obsessives, which I suppose was inevitable; there seem to be plenty of scripts and softwares around that can handle this sort of thing, many of them dealing in a single "GEDCOM" file format. Which, conveniently, is very clunky and retro and pure ASCII, so could be maintained as a page in the Wiki, for anyone to plug into whatever software they liked.
So I've put a rough GEDCOM file up in the Wiki, containing the McGeddon family and branching out into a couple of others. It might not be an entirely valid file, as I built it by hand (having absurd difficulty in finding anything to generate GEDCOM files that wasn't a 15mb Visual Basic program, or demanding a yearly $49.95 payment, or both) - it crashed one GEDCOM parser I downloaded, but worked okay with the other, and was able to generate a bunch of static, browseable pages for me.
If anyone wants to dig some decent software out and put together a more comprehensive GEDCOM file - I presume it's fairly painless, if you've got a graphical interface - feel free to hijack the Wiki page. (Email me for the password, if you're not an admin but would like change-access to the Wiki.)
And then I tripped and fell into the terrifying world of online genealogy obsessives, which I suppose was inevitable; there seem to be plenty of scripts and softwares around that can handle this sort of thing, many of them dealing in a single "GEDCOM" file format. Which, conveniently, is very clunky and retro and pure ASCII, so could be maintained as a page in the Wiki, for anyone to plug into whatever software they liked.
So I've put a rough GEDCOM file up in the Wiki, containing the McGeddon family and branching out into a couple of others. It might not be an entirely valid file, as I built it by hand (having absurd difficulty in finding anything to generate GEDCOM files that wasn't a 15mb Visual Basic program, or demanding a yearly $49.95 payment, or both) - it crashed one GEDCOM parser I downloaded, but worked okay with the other, and was able to generate a bunch of static, browseable pages for me.
If anyone wants to dig some decent software out and put together a more comprehensive GEDCOM file - I presume it's fairly painless, if you've got a graphical interface - feel free to hijack the Wiki page. (Email me for the password, if you're not an admin but would like change-access to the Wiki.)
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