Thanks, Shauna

At the recent Unlock the Past Brisbane Expo I gave a talk each day about using the Flip-Pal and organising one's images with Picasa. My three other presentations were on Geneablogging, Geneawebinars and Google+ for Genealogy.


As a former teacher I love sharing knowledge with others and encouraging them to explore new resources and topics. I was thrilled to be given an opportunity to share my enthusiasm for Blogging, Google+ and Webinars at this Unlock the Past event. An important part of any process is evaluation so I was chuffed that many of the attendees took the time to stop by the Gould stand and give me feedback on my performance.


What really made the effort worthwhile was that someone who attended some of my talks took the time to blog about the experience and even better was that the person who did so was Shauna Hicks, one of Australia's foremost genealogy presenters. Shauna said:


"For my second session I decided to go to one of the free sessions and I'm glad I did. Jill Ball gave a great three part presentation on webinars (GeneaWebinars), Flip Pal mobile scanners and Picasa for genealogists. It was a practical session with Jill taking the mystery out of these areas and showing how simple it really is to use these great tools for our family history research. My only gripe was that it should have been longer and part of the paid talk series so that more people could have had the opportunity to attend. The great news is that Jill's slides for all three talks will be on the Unlock the PastResources page soon."


Thank you, Shauna, that paragraph on your blog made my day.


When you enjoy a talk, presentation or a piece of writing do you take the time to give feedback to the person responsible for the work?

Anywhere Anytime Genealogy

This afternoon I am presenting a talk at The Society of Australian Genealogists on Anywhere, Anytime Genealogy.

As I believe that evaluation is an important part of any process I want to give attendees an opportunity to let me know how they found this afternoon's presentation. I am hoping that some of them will use the comments section of this post to give me feedback.

Feedback from the Webmaster - Watson/Canet Family History Site

I get a bit of a buzz when a reader actually comments on something about which I have blogged. I blog mainly for myself but love it when something I have written elicits a response.

In response to my post yesterday about her website Michelle posted a comment. As people who have read the post may not go back a second time to look at the comment I am reposting it. In this comment Michelle answers some of the questions I raised about her site.

Thanks, Michelle, for your comments and your gracious acceptance of my post.

"Dear Geniaus,

Thanks for the feature. I thought I'd answer some of your questions:

Software - the website is entirely coded in HTML, with extensive use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I use Dreamweaver to develop and manage my websites. CSS allows me to completely change the look of the site by changing one .css file. I used CSS for two reasons, it allows me to update navigation and other standard elements contained on all pages by changing a single .css file and it allows me to better optimise page viewing for text based users including those viewing the site on mobile devices.

The site is nearly completely text based. All this means it loads very quickly and it looks exactly the same on a computer monitor as it does on an iPhone or iPad.

For example the trees are not generated by family tree software but are manually coded tables made using HTML.

This site wasn't so much a replacement for a full family tree but to make my research more accessible and to make it more likely to be harvested and listed in search engines.

What I need to do is to add links to both my blog and to my Ancestry family tree, which is much more extensive.

Cheers,
Michelle"