rootsweb and ancestry sponsorship

Virginia Family Tree - a genealogy resource: What's up with Rootsweb and Ancestry?

A few months ago, Ancestry sprung a surprise on the volunteers at Rootsweb and the USGenWeb Project. Ancestry was going to put a banner at the top of every page hosted on Rootsweb, an advertisement for their company. A large number of Rootsweb volunteers went crazy, furious that Ancestry had the audacity to turn their genealogy project into a profit center. The USGenWeb Project always stated its mission as being “non-commercial and fully committed to free genealogy access for everyone.” These principles seemed to clash...or did they?

I currently volunteer for two counties in Virginia. I have honestly neglected the sites for awhile because I am tired of all the controversy that has been brewing. Volunteers are moving their sites off Ancestry's servers so a lot of the old links do not work anymore. How does that help freely spread genealogy when you cannot find it? This is a huge mess and I am honestly getting tired of being a part of it. I think I am going to probably give up my two sites but I have not decided yet.

Through all of this I have not moved my sites nor would I in the future, if I keep them. The Ancestry banner is quite small, very similar to the Blogger banner you see at the very top of this page. Google owns Blogger. Blogger gives free web space for people to host their blog. It is therefore their right to get at least a small ad out of it. The ads are unobtrusive and most people do not pay any attention to them. I do not see what all the fuss is about.

I am getting a little off track but the point is that the USGenWeb project is at risk of falling apart, simply over a one-half inch banner at the top of every page. The banner says “Hosted at Rootsweb...an Ancestry.com Community.” It does not sell products or blatantly push a subscription service. It is a token gesture to give Ancestry more exposure in a tough market. If you look at Google trends, genealogy searches are falling off more each year. You cannot fault Ancestry for trying to expand their market reach in these trying times.

I would estimate that Ancestry spends tens of thousands of dollars per year to pay for all of the server space and bandwidth that Rootsweb has enjoyed for years. Instead of understanding that someone has to pay for all that space, people get all upset and scream that genealogy should be free for everyone. The last time I checked, it still was free. Ancestry is not directly selling anything with the banner and no subscription is required. I doubt they even get a large amount of traffic off the banners. People will become blind to them in a short mount of time. I wish some of the volunteers at the USGenWeb Project would stop looking a gift horse in the mouth and be happy that they have the support of a large, financial backer."

Usability, Design, and CSS

Andy Budd on Usability, Design, and the Death of CSS [Design Principles]: "SP: What's your opinion of CSS Frameworks, and how do they fit into the approach you guys take in developing a solution for a client?"

We have an internal framework that we use for our wireframes -- our prototypes. Wireframes are not things that live by themselves, so it doesn't really matter how semantic or pure they are.

This library, or "framework" if you want to be down with the hip kids, is a mixture of HTML and CSS and JavaScript, which we use time and time again for our wireframing. It makes use of jQuery, and a company we work with called New Bamboo have helped us to develop a jQuery plugin called polyPage, which allows multiple state changing within a wireframe, which is really cool.

So I think these libraries -- frankly, I think "framework" is a bit of a grandiose term for something like Blueprint, for example. Essentially it's three or four CSS files and a page worth of HTML. It's not a framework -- a framework, I think, is a much bigger thing. And there's a certain element of trumpet-blowing going on there. By calling it a framework, it makes it sound like it's this big, important thing like Ruby on Rails. Everyone knows Ruby on Rails is hot, everyone knows Django is hot -- let's call it a CSS framework, and it will be big.

I think what you need to do is develop your own framework. You need to develop a series of tools, a library of elements that work for your team, that work for the types of sites you build, that work for the internal belief system structure and knowledge that your team has.

I think generic libraries like Blueprint box you in to certain solutions. They have a certain amount of flexibility, sure. You can choose between one of any number of columns -- I think it's 16 or 24 -- and you can span columns and stuff. But it's still limited to this column behaviour. And you're limited to the size of the gutters and the width of the window, and if that doesn't necessarily fit with your designs, what do you do? Do you spend hours hacking your library to fit with your designs? . . . . . .

Andy Budd on Usability, Design, and the Death of CSS [Design Principles]

But on the other hand the whole purpose of web standards, partly, is digital preservation -- if everyone created web sites in the proper fashion, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

I honestly think that CSS is basically a dead technology after this next revision. I think that's really sad, because I'm a standards advocate, but that's what I believe. I don't think we'll see a CSS4. I don't think we'll see half of the modules in CSS3 implemented, or even end up in the specification, because CSS3 has been under development for 8 years or something ridiculous, and in 8 years we haven't got a single module complete yet. We've got a few almost finished.

But I do think that in this world where I've got a PS3 at home that performs live texture-mapping rendering in 3D, on the fly, why we can't get a browser that can render rounded corners on a box in 2008. You know, we should all have jet packs here! A rounded corner box or multiple background images shouldn't be rocket science.

I think part of the problem is that there are innate problems with the standards development mechanism, and I think there are innate problems with the browser vendors, and I do think we're going to see other technologies -- sadly, proprietary technologies like Flash and Flex and XAML and XML and MXML and non-native Web technologies -- take over, because we are limited with what we can do with our current technology. The reason we're seeing all of these JavaScript libraries come out is because they're supplementing what the standards and the browsers should be doing. It's kind of a stupid situation to be in, and we've got to lobby the W3C to pull their finger out to get these standards ratified, we've got to lobby the browser vendors to stop arguing among each other over petty little things and implement them, and there needs to be a radical shake-up in the way these things are created.

Andy Budd on Usability, Design, and the Death of CSS [Design Principles]: "I do think it's really hard though, and I think what you need to do is specialise. I think gone are the days of the generalist, because I think that, sadly, if you're a generalist, it does mean that you're doing everything not to the highest possible quality. Because there are so many specialists now, you've got to compete with those. So starting off and being really good at web standards, for example, if you want to get a job in industry, if you're really good at HTML and CSS then you will get a job, it doesn't take that long to learn HTML and CSS.

But learning the softer usability skills -- you can learn heuristics, you can learn basic principles. But it's not until you've actually sat down and built loads of sites and screwed them up that you can do that properly."

RootsWeb: NEWSROOM-ANNOUNCEMENT-L [NEWSROOM-ANNOUNCEMENT] New Mastheads - Look for them today.

RootsWeb: NEWSROOM-ANNOUNCEMENT-L [NEWSROOM-ANNOUNCEMENT] New Mastheads - Look for them today.: "ay 21st, 2008 by Anna

As planned, the updated mastheads will start appearing later today. We
receive a lot of positive feedback on the content of your sites and are
proud to be able to be a small part of your success.

If you would like to change the masthead on your site from the new default
gray color to the green masthead please follow the instructions below.

Place a file named 'banner_select' in your public_html directory. (Yes, it
is a text file, containing only the text listed. But there is no file
extension; the file should be named 'banner_select'). This file should
contain the text 'BasicGreen' and nothing else.
Hosted projects who are using custom mastheads have been sent additional
emails with specific instructions. If you have not received these
instructions please contact the leader of the project you belong to."

RootsWeb: NEWSROOM-ANNOUNCEMENT-L [NEWSROOM-ANNOUNCEMENT] New Mastheads - Look for them today.

RootsWeb: NEWSROOM-ANNOUNCEMENT-L [NEWSROOM-ANNOUNCEMENT] New Mastheads - Look for them today.: "ay 21st, 2008 by Anna

As planned, the updated mastheads will start appearing later today. We
receive a lot of positive feedback on the content of your sites and are
proud to be able to be a small part of your success.

If you would like to change the masthead on your site from the new default
gray color to the green masthead please follow the instructions below.

Place a file named 'banner_select' in your public_html directory. (Yes, it
is a text file, containing only the text listed. But there is no file
extension; the file should be named 'banner_select'). This file should
contain the text 'BasicGreen' and nothing else.
Hosted projects who are using custom mastheads have been sent additional
emails with specific instructions. If you have not received these
instructions please contact the leader of the project you belong to."