Falling into place

I got a phone call this afternoon from Genealogy.com regarding my recent membership. Apparently they have merged with Ancestry.com recently and was asking me if I wanted to transfer my account from Genealogy to Ancestry. Since the Family Tree Maker 2005 hooks directly into Ancestry.com it was a no brainer to move over to a site that has a larger database tightly integrated into the software.

Family Tree Maker 2005 is very interesting. I've been adding names into it and what's amazing is that it will automatically search databases to corroborate names and locations. With myself, it picked up all the locations that I had listed phone numbers in the past 10 years.

I have installed vbulletin software onto the server last night. I spent today setting it up and I'm testing the different sections now to make sure that what I'm envisioning is actually possible out of the box. I am a moderator on a very large vbulletin community of about 52,000 members from all over the world. I've seen some of the back end pieces, but I was completely floored to see the whole backend. It's quite intricate and is going to be more than capable of doing what is needed.

I won't have time to meet up with the web designer this week which I was hoping to do. We need to work on the flowchart of how all these components are going to work together. As I get the software components it really is helping me see how they will connect together.

One of the next things that I need to do is settle on a standardized set of interview questions so that I can start talking to people and getting their biographies done. Again, I have a template in mind and how it's going to flow on the webpage. This information doesn't need to wait for the technology pieces so I should stop wasting time and just get that part done already.