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Bosschaerts - Persyn Genealogical research - Evolution websites
Already in 1994 I also decided to publish an online version of the Bosschaerts genealogy.
 The first version was a very basic html-page by use of GED2WWW, hosted free at Geocities (now Yahoo!) with already more than 16.000 persons. Ged2WWW was a good start, for setting up my first webpage.
Via my genealogical program called “HazaData”  I produced a GedCom datafile (GedCom is an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunication, a textfile-format to exchange genealogical data)
Ged2WWW converted the gedcom file into html pages, with index of the surnames. A very basic text format that links persons.
The Bosschaerts Persyn Genealogical Research is already online since 1994.
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 But in “Zoons & Dochters” a lot of background information was present: info about the coats of arms, detailed information about the painters family Ambrosius Bosschaert or other known persons; and it was a pity not to publish it as well.
My genealogical background information has grown too.
Also a lot of pictures were available, so the idea was growing to publish this too; together with new information, also a guestbook; earliest traces, known persons, some historical notes, explanation of the family names, etc
Via IT-help of Sven Bosmans a layout by frames in html pages was setup.
This time we used GedHTree to convert our genealogical data into html pages.
In 2003 a second version of the website was published at a Telenet.be site with more than 24.000 persons with the limitation of only 4 main branches with graphical layout.
And again I was pleased with the result!
Our genealogical mission : publish our genealogical research in order to find relatives worldwide. Via email or phone calls relatives and other people were contacted and the website was a good way to show our intention. Our research started to grow by its own.
At the same time several problems were risen: the graphical layout produced more than 4.000 html pages !!! Persons mentioned in the text files were linked with the genealogical data, so updating required to update all the links in the text files, which took several hours and always caused cross links failures.
Another problem, caused by the html-frames: search-engines only showed single pages, instead of the 3 framed multi-page layout. Celesta Kers of Studio100fan.eu (found via research about Dirk Bosschaert, a Belgian artist and actor) solved this problem with a script file to reload the frame page instead of the single html pages.
In 2004 our webpage already counted 28.975 persons, and I definitely decided to find another solution to publish out genealogical data.
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It took several years to find a good solution to upgrade our website without the problems or adding or upgrading.
Html turned out to be unpractical for manually updating with such a lot of data and links.
PHP (a kind of template) in combination with MySQL (the database) was the best solution to publish a data-based genealogy, but programming it is not that easy (at least not me).
I was very pleased to find TNG (The Next generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding") by Darrin Lythgoe.
TNG uses scripting (PHP) and a database (mySQL) to produce dynamic webpages.
Again Sven Bosmans helped me with converting the old html pages and layout into the new php style.
In 2006 a third version was born : The Bosschaerts-Persyn genealogy in a TNG layout via php and mySQL.
And again I was even more pleased with the result because now my genealogical data is directly linked with the text files and pictures via TNG.
TNG is now my online genealogical research system; and offline remains another database.
Already in 2009 the counter reached 30.000 persons, and in 2016 it will reach 35.000 persons ! |
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