North Carolina Genealogy » General Site Info

What do I do?

Avery — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 22:19:36 +0000

I’m sure to some people it seems as though I rarely visit here to post. There are some that write in and seem to have the impression that there are many people that work on the site. I thought I’d take a moment to let you know it’s just one person. I try to keep up as best as I can, but I do have other ventures which keep me busy as well. I enjoy writing and working on this and my other genealogy sites, but as most of you, I have pay the bills. One such “pay the bills project” I’ve been working on lately is Asheville SEO Services and Web hosting in Asheville. I’ve actually done this for a number of years (15) somewhat quietly and have just designed a standalone site (away from my personal domain) to advertise and more correctly promote these services. Much of my computer service has evolved from onsite tech support into VPS Server and Linux server administration.

This means I get to do more work from home, or wherever I am. Unfortunately lately it hasn’t left me much time to tend my own sites as is often the case. (How many carpenters have I known that needed to take a few weeks to work on their OWN renovations?) In many cases it leaves me feeling as though the work never ends. (Truth be told when my health is well (long story in itself re: meniere’s disease and Rheumatoid Arthritis…) I am not uncommonly working from 9 or 10 in the morning to 3 AM.)

In any case, thanks for visiting my site!

New Alabama Genealogy Sister Site

Avery — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 01:07:21 +0000

I hinted last week that there was another sister site on the way. Well, today the Alabama Genealogy site officially launched. You’ll notice that for now we have the same layout as here. As we have here, we have built pages for each county (67) in the state of Alabama with a profile and resources. Of course, there is more work to be done there, here and at the South Carolina Genealogy and Rhode Island Genealogy sites, but there are other sites on the way as well, although it may be a little while before the next official opening.

Exciting News…. We’re Growing!

Avery — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:28:30 +0000

We’ve got some exciting news to share with you. Our network of sites is growing! You probably already know of our sister site at South Carolina Genealogy. Today we’d like to welcome Rhode Island Genealogy to the fold as well. In coming weeks we hope to be able to announce another addition to the family of sites! (To drop a hint…. the next one should be in the south.) So, we’re busy trying to get resources indexed and organized over at the Rhode Island site (and still working on updates here as well.) The county pages there are already useful enough to start sharing with the world though, so if you’re looking for any ancestors up in the Rhode Island area stop by! Thanks!

Massive County Page Update!

Avery — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:48:35 +0000

After last weekends realization that there were many broken links on the county resources pages…. I went on quite a roll reinvigorating the county pages. I think all of them should have somegood content and a refreshing to make sure that all the links are current. (The new link checker script only tells me if there is an error pulling the page up, so…. if it’s the wrong address we don’t know unless it is checked…)

MANY MANY THANKS!!!! to those of you who have sent in corrections on links in the last couple of weeks. It was a tremendous help and helped me realize that I still had quite a bit of work to do with some of the county pages that were “unloved”. Every county now should have a brief sketch and LOTS of other information. As always, if you know of other resource that should be there, make use of the contact form and let me know! (Leave of the http::// in any addresses and I think that will get past the spam filtering in the form.

It’s true that we still have some counties that are a bit lean on details and we would love to incorporate YOUR input on those counties. Also, it looks like I’ve worked into a routine of formatting from Macon County on that I may need to go back over the first half of the alphabet and use the same formatting, but…. this is another significant improvement for our county pages.

Thanks for stopping by!

Broken Links, Fixing them and a Request for Help

Avery — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 04:44:41 +0000

Update– July 5th–
As of right now all of the links on this site have been updated, and corrected (over 400 corrected). A handful of links 10 or so were removed outright because the information is no longer found or domain is gone/not responding for a couple days, etc.

The original post continues below….

As some of you may have noticed there are broken links on this site. It’s a simple fact of the way the internet is. Pages are always moving, changing their address, going away and new resources being added. I remember the very first building of this site entailed many days on end of my time collecting links and organizing them. Unfortunately I’m sure the minute I finished someone, somewhere decided to move their counties census archive to antoher server or something along those lines. The point is, the internet is in a state of flux and it takes more time than you would realize to keep up with it when there are so many resources we’re trying to cover. (We, actually translates to ME.) I’ve recently installed a link checker scripts that will mark through invalid links and notify me of broken links, which will help. I used to MANUALLY check the links from time to time. Now I’ve installed a plugin that will help identify broken links and have spent about 6 hours updating around 300 links. There are still quite a few to go and I will work on those over the next few days.

What I’m leading up to though is a request….. I GREATLY appreciate it if you know of the new location for a resource, county genweb site, or other link. I have had a few occasions where a site owner sends me an email updating their link information. Most of the time instead I find a broken link when a visitor sends me an email asking if I know where they’ve moved to. SO…. if you know of a moved resource I would greatly appreciate if you would make use of our contact form to let me know of it’s location. The only catch is that our current form is a bit picky and for spam prevention declines weblinks in this format http://www.weblinks.com – so substitute xx for the // and make links look more like http:xxwww.google.com if you would. (There may be a replacement contact form coming in the near future…) Thanks for your help!

County Page Updates | Alamance, Catawba, Moore

Avery — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:38:57 +0000

Thanks in part to some forum posts over the weekend I’ve been making some updates to the following county pages today: Alamance County Genealogy, Catawba County Genealogy, and Moore County Genealogy. Moore County got the biggest update, with a feed from the forums plus a thumbnail sketch of the county history. Alamance and Catawba got forum feeds added to the page. The forum feeds are RSS feeds from the County forum of the same name which shows the subject and summary of the most recent posts in that forum. Not quite 1/5th of the counties have forum feeds added yet, but as posts collect in the forum I’ll be adding the feeds on the appropriate pages.

Strange Cache Problem – Technical Note

Avery — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 02:08:47 +0000

The last several days I suspect that at least the front page wasn’t showing here. My first clue was when a couple articles I have pending at an article site were rejected because the links didn’t measure up to their editorial guidelines. ((?)?) So, I took a look and the front page looked okay to me. Then, being a Computer Technician I wondered what I would see from another browser. 403 Forbidden and some error message about not having permissions to access a certain file. It turns out that since I was logged in it wasn’t an issue in my usual browser. I thought traffic looked low (about a third of normal) for the last few days.

Anyway, the cache is only partly working right now, but the problem has been resolved, so things should be back to normal.

Mecklenburg and Ashe Page update

Avery — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:21:27 +0000

Yes, I’m still working on county page updates. There are, after all, 100 of them (!) and this isn’t the only thing I do… today I visited Mecklenburg County NC‘s page for a BIG update as well as including the forum feed. I also added the forum feed for Ashe County as well. I like having the forum feeds on the county pages because it just gives those posts MUCH more visibility and as each of the county forums get busier I’ll be adding them in there. So…. be sure to stop by and post queries in the Forums!! (We’re getting a surge of traffic today – we’ve had around 300 views thus far today.)

And…. New Hanover County’s page has been updated. Forum feeds added to Cabarrus, Chatham, Edgecombe, Greene and Lenoir Counties. Forum feed added to the Johnston County page on 10-20.

Also Wake County has had an update. (AND Orange County.) Harnett County now has a forum feed.

Union County, Wilkes County and Yancey County pages have all seen updates too.

More County Page Updates and Query Forum Integration

Avery — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:56:57 +0000

Just thought I’d post a note to acknowledge that I’ve modified the following county pages: Beaufort,Bertie,Bladen,Brunswick,Buncombe,Burke. Also…

Also, As the forum has started to get a few posts I’m adding in Query forum feeds on the county pages. So, at the bottom of the county pages you’ll start seeing the most recent Query Posts in that Counties forum. Currently those are Anson, Chowan, Franklin and Pitt Counties. That gives the added advantage of a bit more visibility on the County Forum Query Posts.

I’ve gone back and edited Franklin and Pitt Counties as well. (Also Rutherford county has now seen an update.)

Even more page edits with Haywood and Johnston, Polk, Greene, Cabarrus, Davidson, Chatham counties getting a revision.

County Page updates

Avery — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:52:11 +0000

Here’s a quick in-between regular posts note….

I’ve been working the last couple days on County page revision and expansion. This is likely a process that will never really end, but…. I’ve made improvements to the following pages:

Alamance County Genealogy, Alexander County Genealogy, Alleghany County Genealogy, Anson County Genealogy, Ashe County Genealogy, Avery County Genealogy, Chowan County Genealogy, Craven County Genealogy, Forsyth County Genealogy, Granville County Genealogy, Martin County Genealogy, Montgomery County Genealogy, Scotland County Genealogy, Robeson County Genealogy

I think that covers the list of what I’ve updated at this point. I know there are MANY more to improve. Unfortunately some seem little more than a stub, but I’m trying to make it a priority to get to each of them.