Phil Moir's Blog

Today saw us eventually roll out some changes that we have be trying to deploy for a few (very stressful) weeks now. Again, I'd like to apologise for any inconvenience that this has caused anyone, and I hope in the majority of cases we should see an improvement in service. We are very carefully watching the logs that report errors that occur, and anything that can be fixed quickly will be actioned. I do have to confess that some errors do occur that are not straight-forward and we are unable to replicate. To help us, we have added additional logging of these errors that can hopefully help us to resolve these obscure issues.

Included in this release

What probably interests members more is what is included in the release, so here goes:

• Military records - A new set of data records, that can be optionally purchased by Platinum subscribers, or accessed via Pay Per View, has been added. As always the records can be searched for free, but viewing the transcriptions and where available, the images, has to be done via the relevant purchase option. There are more records that will be released into this option over the coming weeks.


• Household transcriptions - Previously only the 1911 census had the full household transcription. We have now added this feature to all census records. You get rather large and very interesting results when you come across an institution as several hundred people can be listed under one roof!


• Payment mechanism - We have updated our payment mechanism. The payments are now handled by the Genes Reunited payment system, where before it was routed via the Friends Reunited system. You should not really experience any real difference, except we have made the screen a little prettier.


• Home Page - We have revised the tree that appears on the home page, which allows more interactivity and editing is easier. We have also made some minor changes to this page to highlight the search and improve performance.


• Searching for names beginning with "Con","Nul" - The technology we use sometimes affects the way our application works in unexpected ways. One of them is the ability to use certain words in the web address. There is now a fix for this, and it has been included in this release, so for those that have seen an error when searching for "Con" in forename, now you can try again and not see an error!


• Searching with spaces - The same issue affected people who inadvertently had saved names that included spaces at the start or end of the name. When searching an error screen was shown, with no indication of why. You should now see the search results you expected.


• Report link on boards - The "Report as Abuse" link on boards has been changed to "Report". The reason behind this text change is that there are 4 report options, and only 1 relates to abuse. More changes to the report mechanism should be coming soon too.


• Links to old blogs - The blog summary pages now provide links (at the bottom) to previous posts, so you can scroll back to the very start. Remember, you also narrow down the blogs displayed by clicking on the blog account link, i.e. Genes Blog, or on one of the tag links, i.e. Who Do You Think You Are, and this will narrow the results shown in the summary.


• Performance improvements - We have also implemented a few changes across the site that should see an slight improvement in the load of some pages. This work is definitely ongoing and we always will strive to make the site run as fast as possible.

We have some more exciting changes coming soon, including tree improvements, more data records to search, improvements to photo section, etc. Having now got this release out the way, I can also concentrate again on suggestions and bugs getting reported, and making some of the smaller, but most requested changes to the site including fixes to the boards, transcription errors, and more.

Thank you once again for supporting the site and hope you enjoying some of the changes made and that are coming.

Best regards, Phil Moir
Genes Reunited, Leade Developer