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About...
This website —
This site is the result of my interests in computers, the
internet and my family history.
As a child I was not given much information about my ancestors
or even my relatives. It was only after the untimely
death of my father in 1984, and my raising two wonderful daughters
who will probably go forth and procreate, that I started to
take an interest in my heritage, my "culture" if
you will, and how we came to be here in New Zealand.
An introduction to modern PCs happened in the middle of 2000
during a period of enforced inactivity due to a foot injury.
I was soon hooked on the internet and computers in general
and began serious tertiary studies in the middle of 2001 and
in 2004 I completed a Diploma in Information Technology and
Computing at the Waikato Institute of Technology, Hamilton,
New Zealand.
The information about my family history that I am able to
find on the internet is increasing all the time, and the ability
to share this information with anyone around the world has
led to my making contact with people as diverse as a fifth
cousin near Leeds in the UK, to a half-sister I had never
met until 2004 and living in Australia.
A third cousin near Whangarei in Northland, New Zealand,
is another connection I have made through the internet and
we have become good friends and I usually make a side-trip
to Whangarei Heads to see her when I am travelling north to
call on other relatives.
Part of my Diploma curriculum requires an internet project
and initially I had planned a presentation-style website covering
the events and people surrounding the shipwreck mentioned
elsewhere in this site, but eventually led to deciding on
a new style and "professional" look to existing
genealogy websites and submitting the lot as my project. Now
you see it.
Technology —
This website has been designed by me for me. In other
words, it is designed to suit the formats that I use to view
the internet in my browser at my home. While trying
to make this site as user-friendly as I deem necessary, because
of your ability to alter your own machine settings I feel
no responsibility to attempt to "guess" what these
may be.
Therefore it is in large-ish type in 800x600 resolution.
This suits viewing on a 17-inch monitor. Anyone
who chooses to have television-size displays with very fine
resolutions should have thought of the lowest common denominator
before they spent all that money.
Small-ish page filesizes. Because I was somewhat restricted
by a 56kbps dial-up modem I appreciated webpages that open
fast and allow you to quickly find the information you are
after and go there. I have tried to keep image sizes to a
minimum and the number of images on a page depends on the
actual contents of the page.
Web pages that are inherently photograph albums will invariably
contain more images and thus lengthen page-loading times.
Please be patient as these pages load and, hopefully,
you will be able to browse text relating to these images as
they load.
In order to display these pages as intended I wished to publish
them from a free web host that does not insist on advertising
and to this end you may be viewing this website on the server
belonging to "Orcon New Zealand".
However, to reach the widest possible audience while maintaining
the genealogy focus I have also published this website on
the free pages at "Rootsweb.com". These servers
also feature highly in lists of genealogy websites provided
by internet search engines such as "Google", and
have been the main avenue for making contact with others interested
in these family connections.
Navigation —
After an early burst of enthusiasm for Javascript and all
the fancy things it can do with navigation, I started playing
with cascading style sheets (CSS) and the different effects
that could be achieved without a lot of filesize overheads.
CSS sheets also allow one stylesheet to control the entire
website and by applying custom classes to hyperlink styles
a wide range of mouse-over effects can be achieved by making
the viewer's own computer show the changes in their own browser.
Much faster, as there are no images to wait for when
the mouse travels over a link and the actions are done in
the host computer.
There are numerous ways of navigating your way around this
site and I have scattered these around all the pages so hopefully
you won't get lost. To get an overall picture of what
is included here take a look at the Sitemap.
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