| | | Website News November 2009  | Website Updates!
Nov 14: A buggy load of updates and reformats have been completed for census pre-1891. All 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871 and 1881 census on this site should now display properly when the page is loaded. There are too many to set out here with links but primarily affected parishes are Ash-next-Sandwich (has new census added), Ham (new census added), Eastry (new census added), Betteshanger (new census added), Bapchild (new census added), Nonington and Guston. Also new is a parish page for Deptford, which contains links to batch number searches on www.familysearch.org for christenings and marriages, and a new index to the 1871 census for St. Nicholas parish. More amendments and reformats are continuing. |
October 2009 | Website Updates!
Oct 27: After a series of personal and family illnesses this past 5 months or so, I am now able to devote some much-needed time to the Kent Online Parish Clerks project and website.
Many hiccups occurred in throughout the website, first with our last change of web hosts at the middle of June, 2009 and second with the installation of the new version 8.0 of Internet ExplorerTM from Microsoft. Those visitors who installed and use the Microsoft IE 8.0 will find that the Parish Index Page jumps around and prohibits clicking on any of the parish links. For those of you who are having this difficulty, there is a button on the top menu bar of your IE browser between the search/address bar and the refresh button that looks like a sheet of paper torn in half. That is something new in IE8 that Microsoft is calling a "compatibility" tool. If you click on that when you first go to the page it will automatically revert your browser to a compatible mode that will allow the webpage to behave properly. It is very annoying and I am working on fixing it. The page is written in plain and simple HTML yet for some reason the new IE8 just does not like it. So, compatible mode we have to use for now. The first issue I am working on fixing, though, are the dead links from any particular page back to the Home page and the Volunteer page. The Home page problem arose with the switch of web hosts in June - both of the old hosts' servers had recognized the default.html page used for the Home page. The new host required a change from default.html to index.html. Any favourite links that are set to www.kent-opc.org/default.html you will have found, no longer work. Please update your favourite link to www.kent-opc.org/index.html. The second issue to be addressed is the display problem with much of the census and parish register data. This issue has also seemed to arise from the change of web hosts, where earlier hosts supported the html "pre", the new host's servers do not. So, instead of those pages displaying as a straight-forward document listing of the data, all of those pages are now displaying the data in one unbroken line of text. I have already corrected the 1841 census for Addington, Allhallows, Allington, Barfreston, Deal, Denton, Guston, Horsmonden, Nonington, and Stourmouth Over the course of the next month, I will also be reformatting the remaining census as well as any parish register data. Until the time that the technical issues are resolved only minor updates will be made to the data. The Families in Kent link page was updated yesterday with the addition of several new links. Additions will be made in the next several days to the Newspaper Abstracts. |
September 2009 | Orlestone Parish Updates!
Sept 13: We now have added transcriptions of the Bishop's Transcripts of christenings, marriages and burials 1603 through 1812 for Orlestone. Census to follow along soon. |
July 2009 | Orlestone Parish now live!
July 31: With hearty and grateful thanks to Laurae Harvey of Australia for her sponsorship of Orlestone parish, we now have Orlestone added to the active parish pages. Over this weekend, transcriptions of the Bishop's Transcripts will also be added to the parish with a series of census to follow along after. Her sponsorship dollars have enabled us to acquire the necessary records to make these transcriptions possible.
The Orlestone parish page also marks the unveiling of a new format for our primary parish pages. Hopefully, active links to records will now be more distinguishable from those with no information. The statistical information for the parish has now been expanded and better organized and includes the Ordnance Survey map coordinates along with longitude and latitude. The location of the workhouse has also been added, a records location guide and a bibliography of writings concerning the parish. A separate link list for village resources has been added at the bottom of the links section. One-by-one all existing parish pages will be converted into the new format while new parish pages will be in the new format from inception. |
June 2009 | We have a new web home!
June 22: A new web host has been secured and so far, the difference is noticeable in how security of the website is handled. There appears to be a much more proactive attitude of the new hosting company to thwarting unwanted intruders into web directories and spamming emails. I have reverted the website back to the html format in use as of November 2008, prior to our move to iWeb in Montreal. Slowing the pages are going back up and will be accessible in stages. If you have bookmarked a page and you receive a 404 Page Not Found error, please try again in a few days or write to me with the page name that you were attempting to access. After all of the primary web pages are restored, I will then re-institute the Kent Family Garden - even though the links are now in place on some newly uploaded pages - to be followed by a users' forum. Once again I ask for your understanding and patience. Bottlenecks will be experienced until this newest transition is at an end. Also you will find that new general information pages have been added and some items removed from direct menu access such as the pages for coast guards and publicans. Those pages can now be accessed from the Occupations index page. |
May 2009 | We are moving web hosts, again!
May 31: The Kent Family Garden had been hacked into for the fifth time in the past six months. I was not informed of the situation until very late on Saturday, 30 May 2009 although I am told that the database was suspended by iWeb Technologies on 27 May 2009 during the early morning hours. A hack attack on 23 May 2009 also prompted iWeb to suspend the database and despite my ongoing efforts at resolving this problem apparently those do not seem to be sufficient for iWeb to grin and bear the situation until its' resolution. Therefore, it appears that this particular hosting company is unable to provide a secure and hack-proof server to the Kent OPC project and I am once again going to be moving this service to a new web hosting company as of 17 June 2009. It is absolutely intolerable to have a hosting company remove a critical section of a website unilaterally at any time without due advance notice. Accordingly, please take note that this website may be down or unfindable by search engines, at most, for one to two weeks until the new DNS names are recognized. Thank you for your forebearance and my sincere apologies to all as any information contained in log-ins will be lost upon the move. |
| | |
