Information for GENUKI page maintainers
Maintenance and development of Genuki pages is broken down into county sections, and
this page attempts to describe the infrastructure provided to assist you in
undertaking this task.
Keeping in contact
There are three places where we need to have your current email address so that we can
contact you when the need arises.
- The maintainers email list which is a closed list
restricted to county maintainers. If you need to change your email address, you can change your list subscription yourself, via that web
page. Control is managed by an individual list password that is supplied to you when you join, and via a remider of it sent to you each
month. If you forget to change it until after your email address has changed, you may need to resubscribe via that page. If so send Phil a
separate reminder as subcription to this list has to be approved.
- The genuki-sc email list which is an open list for anybody with an
interest in our service. We use this for announcements which we wish to make to a a larger audience. Again use the web page to make any
changes. Subscription does not require approval for this list.
- In our county database table where we hold your name and email address amongst other things. This information is used in the contact
scripts which are used in a link at the bottom of every page enabling users to get in touch with you, but without making it available to
spam harvesters. You need to contact Phil Stringer to get changes made to the database.
The Genuki service is run by a group of Trustees who you can of course contact individually or you can
contact us via the trustees email list genuki-t at maillist.ox.ac.uk
If trustees change their email address then they should contact Malcolm Austen to get their entry on the trustees list changed,
and Phil Stringer to change the information on the Trustees page.
Standards
In order to provide a common "look and feel" to all our pages we agree to follow a common set of
standards for page layout and maintenenance.
Quality Control
The nature of the web is that change is a continual process, and links that we use to other people's pages
come and go. In order to enable us to keep on top of this, we run the Genuki Spider at the start of each month
to check all the links on your pages, and to report any problems for correction. The results of the last run
can be checked at any time to see the status of your county. If you have corrected a number of broken links in your pages and would like a
recheck of those pages that contained errors on the last run, then ask Phil for a recheck.
We write pages in html which has a defined syntax. We can of course all make mistakes, and sometimes html syntax errors creep
in. To help us identify these a separate program is run after the Spider run to syntax check all the pages that Spider found in the run.
Again this check can be redone on a county basis after correcting errors by contacting Phil.
Gazetteer
An overall resource that we provide for the UK and Ireland is a gazetteer which can be used to locate places and link into our individual
town and parish pages to find genealogical information. It is split into county sections and although maintenance of these sections is
optional, you are urged to take on maintenance of your county section. That will make it much easier for researchers to find the
information you are providing on the county pages, and especially on which pages to find information relating to the smaller places.
See the statistics page for details about your county section.
If some maintenance is required details can be found on that page. Some of the features are controlled by fields in our county database table.
Church database
The church database is another resource we can provide and this is also maintained in county sections.
I believe this is a unique resource and if you develop your county section it will provide a new tool to help researchers as it can help answer questions that
would normally take a lot of research and detailed local knowledge. Again the statistics page shows details about entries
currently held for your county. Some of the features are controlled by fields in our county database table.
We do have the ability for you to devolve management of the church database entries to another person. The upload of
the churches.csv file is still undertaken by the county maintainer, and any links to files such as church pictures does
need close co-operation with the county maintainer. But work on all the basic details can be carried out separately,
and the email contact link on the dynamic church pages goes to the church database maintainer, rather than the county
maintainer, and thus reduces the work involved in its maintenance.
Information particular to each county is held in a database table and is used by various scripts and maintenance programs.
You can see what is held for each county using the following search link. N.B. A password (ask Phil) is required as means to prevent
visibility of your email address to the world at large.
Unadopted Counties
We do have a number of unadopted counties and some where the maintainer is no longer
able to continue developing them. These are marked in the Spider results page with a
red star determined by fields in our county database table. For each county in this
care and maintenance status, the named maintainer has agreed to correct any broken links identified by
the Spider.
Host specific information
Some of you host information at your own site or with an ISP. However if you are using space provided by other Genuki personnel
then some site specific advice is available.
- Space provided at Manchester - at www.genuki.org.uk.
- Space provided at Goldsmiths - at homepages.gold.ac.uk Peter can you provide a page we can link to?
Scripts that can be used
A number of cgi scripts have been developed over the years which can be used to add content to your pages.
Creating basic town/parish pages where required
We have been providing a service for many years now and it is disappointing that some counties still do
not have a set of basic pages for the parishes (see standards). There are two ways to help relieve this deficiency.
- If your web pages are hosted at Manchester, contact Phil who has scripts that can create the directories and basic pages
directly on the server. A likely pre-requisite is some gazetter entry changes to mark the parishes.
- The gazetteer has a facility to dynamically display a page with our normal look and feel, based on the gazetteeer entry etc.
The url is of the form
http://www.genuki.org.uk/cgi-bin/gazplace?GR=SD473618,PLACE=LANCASTER,CCC=LAN
The easiest way to find the url for a particular place is via a gazetteer search asking for results in tabular form. Copy the url
from the link in the middle column. N.B. for Ireland check with Phil first as the link format may have to change.
How to obtain help/advice about county maintenance
A lot of information is contained within the How this Service is Organised section of
the site, but ther is always something mising or not quite clear. The next place to look is the
archives of the maintainers e-mail list as it is quite likely that the subject has been
discussed before, or announcements made about. You will need to enter your email address and the
password sent to you on the monthly reminder to gain access.
Use the search engine on the archive to see if an answer
is held in there. If not send an e-mail to maintainers, as your colleagues will probably know the
answer or be able to suggest where to look.
What to do if there is a problem with your web pages
Malcolm, something about reporting problems to go on www.genuki.info?
What to do if you no longer wish to continue maintaining your county
Circumstances change over time and we will all reach a point where we can no longer continue county maintenance.
- In the majority of cases it will be a fairly slow process, where you can continue the job but would like somebody else to take over.
So contact the trustees and we will mark your county as being in care & maintenance and therefore available for somebody else to take over.
But you will continue working on it with a minimum of fixing bad links, but you can also continue to add to it.
- The final stage is when you can no longer carry on, and this could of course happen suddenly without warning. Again contact should be made with the trustees.
If your pages are not at one of our sites we will move them here, and put them under care/maintenance,
probably initailly asking for a volunteer to do that via the maintainers email list, but aslo using any other means we
think appropriate.
What to do if you can no longer undertake care/maintenance of a county
Inform the trustees. If your pages are not at one of our sites we will move them here, and ask for a new volunteer via the
maintainers email list etc.
Find
help, report problems, or contribute information.
[Last updated: Monday, 01-Oct-2007 13:50:55 BST - Phil Stringer]
