Reviving an old history blog

I’ve decided to revive our old family history blog on Blogger.

A couple of years ago I moved everything from there to this blog because there were problems with the Blogger software, which caused a lot of people to move from Blogger to WordPress. I left the old blog there with a link to this one.

Now Blogger has improved, and appears to be stable, so I’ll start using it again.

But there’s not much point in having two identical family history blogs, so I’ll use them for different purposes. WordPress and Blogger have strong points and weak points and one is better for some purposes and the other is better at other things.

So this blog, the WordPress one, I’ll mainly use for the more personal stuff, stories and news of our family and our own family history research. So you will be most likely to find this blog interesting if you are related to us, no matter how distantly. WordPress is better for this kind of thing because it makes it easier to post family photos and give them captions. I’ll also use it as a kind of research log, with news of things we find, and what other members of the family find.

The other blog, the Blogger one, I’ll use for more general stuff — notes and news on genealogical research generally, research resources, local history articles, background pieces, and general historical stuff. It will also include articles on historical method, technique and theory, comments on software for genealogists and family historians and for research generally, and so on. That’s because one of the strengths of Blogger is making links, grabbing stuff from news articles and putting it in a blog post. It also does a much better job of displaying widgets, like the “Recent Readers” from MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. WordPress often makes a pig’s ear out of it, and sometimes displays the wrong pictures and so on.

The distinction won’t be absolute — I might still post some of our own family history on the other blog, and more general items here, depending on which blogging platform makes it easiest for a particular post.

The blogrolls on each blog will reflect this division as well. Here the links will be mostly to blogs by other family members, with a few more general links. On the other one, we will link to genealogy blogs that deal with the areas we are interested in — southern Africa, the UK, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and also ones that give more general information about genealogical and historical research.

New home for this blog

Owing to problems with Google’s Blogger software, this blog has been moved from http://hayesgreene.blogspot.com on Blogger. You may still be able to read older posts over there, but from now on new posts will be added here.

Some comments have been moved, but comments made on the Haloscan system may not have been moved. I moved it because I was unable to read the blog, or any of the comments, though I was still able to post there. Every time I tried to read it I got a “403 Forbidden” message.

This new site still has to be tidied up, and general information added, but I hope it will prove more reliable than the Blogspot one.

Internet problems

Still having problems with Internet access. We bought an extra 2 gig of access till the end of the month, but it meant having a new temporary account and changing all sorts of settings, and in the process some e-mail was lost, as they put in the wrong address. Things seem to be working for now, though, so if you sent any e-mail to which you expected a reply, please resend.

And please, before sending any e-mail with big attachments (over 100Kb), ASK FIRST! Running out of bandwidth causes huge problems.

Family news, links, odds and ends

News of 2006

Check our family home page for general news and background, especially if you landed here without knowing who we are and are not sure if you know us.

Several friends and family members have sent us Christmas cards and letters, giving news of themselves and their doings, and this is a kind of response to them.

Val, after working for ADT security for 8 years, left for a new job at Telezero in July, at a considerable drop in pay. The advantage was that it was much closer to home, and spending four hours a day in traffic jams was just too much. She’s now resigned from Telezero, and is waiting for her new job to start.

Our daughter Bridget has just moved to a new house in Athens, close to the university, where she is studying for her master’s in theology. She had been working part-time translating books from Greek to English, and is hoping for a job with a big publisher.

Our sons Simon and Jethro are still living at home.

In 2006 we lost three dogs. Our younger dog, Alexa, took ill one morning in January and died before we could get her to the vet. Our other dog, Ariel pined, so we got an Alsatian puppy, Ralf, who died after we had him 12 days. We got him to the vet, and he died on the examination table, and the vet diagnosed biliary, which we think must have been what did in Alexa as well. We got another puppy, Mardigan, a few weeks later, and he was poisoned by the thieves who stole our Toyota Venture from the yard. We got him to the vet, and he seemed likely to recover, but the day after he got home, he had a relapse and died. We later got another puppy, called Samwise, and he is still with us.

In December with the blessing of our Archbishop Seraphim, Steve organised a youth conference with Fr Athanasius Akunda, the first Orthodox youth conference in our diocese. Click here for full report with pictures.

We had a double Christmas in 2006/7 — if you’d like to see more, with pictures, click here and here.

Blogs and blogrolling

If you look at the column on the right, you will see a “Blogroll” — that’s a list of blogs of people related to us. If you hover the cursor over the name of the blog, you should get a description of which branch of the family they belong to (and so be able to see if they are related to you too).

If you are related to us, and have a personal or family blog or web journal, please tell us about it, so that we can add it to the blogroll. If you just have a web page somewhere, please sign our guest book (you’ll also see it in the right-hand column) and put in a link to it, so that we can visit your page.

Comments and links

You can also leave comments about this and any other postings in this blog — you’ll see two places where you can leave comments, and read other comments. If there are no other comments it will say “0 comments”, but if you click on it, you can add your own comments. You may be asked to senter a series of letters, as a precaution against spam. Sometimes you have to do it twice before your comment is accepted, but it will tell you when your comment has been saved.

So there are plenty of ways of keeping in touch, and we hope we will hear from you!

Steve & Val Hayes

Running out of bandwidth

For the last couple of days we have had no internet access, because we have used up our 2 Gig limit.

This means that we cannot use e-mail or any other services for one week out of four, and so if anyone wonders why we haven’t responded to e-mails etc, that is why.

There seems to be an idea the “broadband” means unlimited access, and so people scoff at complaints about sending e-mails with HTML codes that take up ten times the space of the message text, and things like that. I’ve never looked at YouTube videos that people put in ther blogs, or refer to in e-mails, and newsgroup postings, and we still run out of bandwidth.

Of course part of it is spam, but the fact is that bandwidth is not unlimited, even in these days of high-speed connections.