Meet the King-Halls
A few years ago, someone introduced me to a gentleman who lives nearby, with the words: "You might be able to help him out with some web stuff."
The gentleman was Dick Perceval-Maxwell, retired Naval officer, and current guardian of the diaries of his ancestors: several generations of them also Naval officers.
Dick's family records went back about 200 years, and took the reader to every part of the globe. Along the way there was battle, adventure and scandal, all of it faithfully recorded on paper. What Dick wanted to do was put it all online.
The results are now finally in a fit state to be presented to the world, in the form of a Google Sites-powered site simply called King-Hall Connections.
Getting it this far has been an enormous task. Dick, now retired, is blessed with lots of time on his hands. I was his guide around the weirdness that is the web, and along the way I managed to send him down a number of wrong turns and dark alleys. The technical challenges were considerable, despite the site being almost entirely text-based.
Most of the text started life as Word documents, and many of you will know just how horrible they can be to get converted into sensible HTML. My first attempt to build the site did just that - running the Word files through Word's "Save as Web Page" command and trying to string the resulting pages together as a functional site.
The pages were huge, Word's HTML output was abysmal, and simple tasks like embedding links within paragraphs became overwhelmingly complex. Dick kept sending me updates and I fell further and further behind. We needed a new approach, one that would let him do most of the actual web editing work.
I considered lots of options, among them:
- a Blosxom site (abandoned because I didn't think it would solve any of our problems)
- a Wordpress blog (abandoned because the source material didn't go well with the blog format)
- a clone of Phil Gyford's Pepys Diary project (abandoned because Dick wasn't keen on the idea of turning the diaries into short blog-style posts)
- an iWeb site (abandoned because that would still require me to do all the work; Dick does not have a Mac)
- a site powered by something similar to iWeb, but which runs on Windows (I could find no such software)
- a Google Group or Yahoo Group (abandoned because a mailing list wasn't the answer either)
Finally, I realised that the solution was a wiki. Something that Dick himself could edit, and I could help him with as and when required. I toyed with MediaWiki, but found it overcomplicated.
Then I remembered Jottit. I showed it to Dick, and he was delighted. Both of us were taken by its simplicity. Dick worked very quickly and soon had the majority of the diaries and documents online.
But then we ran into problems. The Jottit site began to be unreliable; our requests for help were ignored to start with. All of Dick's emails to Jottit were unanswered. In desperation, I emailed Jottit co-founder Aaron Swartz directly, and he was briefly helpful. But the site remained broken.
Stuck for a solution, I was on the verge of re-installing MediaWiki, and then Google made an announcement: it was re-launching Google Sites.
Finally, here was a service that solved all the problems. Editing was simple and Dick grasped the essentials of it in no time. What's more, it was backed by Google: we both felt that we could depend on it as a service (Dick was understandably nervous about trusting third parties after the mess he got into with Jottit).
So finally, after years of trying to find the best way to put all his millions of words online, we've done it. King-Hall Connections won't be of interest to everyone, but delve into it and you'll find many eye-opening accounts of the way people used to live, and the ways they used to sail.
Needless to say, the site remains a work-in-progress. The next step will be to add some illustrations, and some supporting PDF documents. But thanks to Google Sites' superb UI, user support (a technical hitch encountered in the first few hours was answered - and fixed - by someone at Google as soon as we reported it) and excellent built-in search, Dick and I are both confident that this site will be online, and useful to Naval historians everywhere, for many years to come.
Monday, March 16, 2009
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