Back in the early 00’s I decided to see what courses my local college was doing.
I found they were offering a part time media course that if you did all the years would eventually lead to a degree – not something I’ve ever achieved [for many a reason]. So I signed up … and one of the modules I had to ‘do’ was to design and build a website.
I already owned the dyckhoff.co.uk domain so I decided to use that. Then I spoke with my tutor and asked if building my family tree as a website would be acceptable. After much effort, and a little swearing, the initial version of a family tree was presented. It was crude and very basic.
Skip forward a few years and it is probably now the late 00’s and the course was finished [FWIW I passed with distinction, but never got the degree as the college didn’t have the numbers to justify the cost. Once again my degree dreams were dashed]. The site I’d created was very basic and being as I was reasonably competent with WordPress I decided to update the backend from hand-coded HTML to WordPress. I then went hunting to see if there was already a family tree plugin, but there wasn’t anything.
Then I stumbled across Webtrees. And whilst it wasn’t a WP plugin, it was a fully fledged web-based tool for deploying public or private trees. So I added a WP menu link that re-directed to the frontend of Webtrees and set about configuring it, importing my GEDcom and adding data.
And there you have it. The how and why this site ended up being host to all things Dyckhoff [the power of family].
In another post, I’ll talk about why I started on my family tree and how I’ve grown to love a bit of genealogy.
[…] in print sparked something in me, and so 2yrs later when my media degree (I talked about that in my last post) needed me to create a website from scratch, it struck me as this was a good thing to […]