Genealogy Chat

In case anybody reading doesn't know about it Jill -- there's the large-text option down at the bottom -- the "Text too small?" button.

Which is my opportunity to ask -- what in blazes is going on with *that*? For a while the other day, and again right this moment, I am getting the large text version when I do not want it. I'll click on a link, and suddenly everything is brogdingnagian in proportions, and I get about five words on the monitor before I have to scroll.

The Faq on the point refers to some function that apparently no longer exists ...

But anyhow, maybe I'll mention that when I'm politely asking people to stop shouting in caps. It actually is a very good option for a site like this.

I happen to be a wee bit visually impaired these days myself ... they tell ya that cataract surgery is a walk in the park, but my two -- for which I am waaaay to young to start with -- have been anything but. The first involved a rare reaction to the local anaesthetic that left me writhing in hours of post-op agony, the second much worse. Nine months later, still got a stew of old lens debris floating around my eye, causing - wait for it - pseudophakic cystoid macular edema, which causes a bit of a blank spot in the middle of my vision ... and for some reason I'm getting refraction from the fake lens itself ... and because of all this I haven't bothered to get new glasses, til it settles down, so while I had the first bionic eye reset so I can walk across a room now without nearsightedness specs *and* without knocking over the lamps, the second buggered-up eye is set so that I can read without farsightedness glasses but it doesn't see much of anything farther away than my nose ...

I only hope that I'm still qualifying as injured, and not disabled. It will go away, they say.

But ... I still hate all caps. ;)

Jill,

as someone who had bad eyesight until I had cataracts removed, I found it was much easier and clearer to increase the SIZE of the type face on the screen than to use all caps!


I keep suggesting this, but there is this idea that caps is/are the way to go!



sylvia

Some people write in caps because they are visually impaired and find non-caps difficult to read.

I agree about making it obvious what the thread is about, but I just get annoyed when I have to switch from M.F. to I.E. in order to read it all because a lot of it has dropped off the side of the monitor due to a long thread title, or even a long row of dots.
Another thing that annoys me is when somebody puts an interesting title and says 'in a mo' and they do not add any more.

Yes I agree with Reggie. Sometimes I don´t bother opening a post (I can´t spend a lot of time here) if I can´t see what it´s about, or even if it doesn´t look interesting. I also sometimes feel guilty because there are so many of you out there that spend loads of your time helping people. I think this is a wonderful board and I have learnt so much. Thank you.

Amen, Reggie!

"Please help!"

"Family"

"CAN ANYBODY HELP ME I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR" and here the header ends because it is too long for the space

"Mary Ann"

Now may I suggest:

"Mary Ann Brown c1845 Plymouth, m. John Smith, parents?"

-- and then a simple first sentence (what readers see in the thread list) saying something like:

"Father John Brown, mother Ann, I have been unable to find a record of their marrage."


Just my Stalinist .02 loonie.

Reverting to the original subject............

Please use thread titles which give at least a clue about what you are looking for.............

Reg

Ta, CB!

I hate IE, so I don't worry about it -- and for the few things I use it for, I have my NoFlash. No irritating little boxes. It prompts you to turn it off if you don't want it, when you start up, and then the icon sits down next to the connection icon in the lower right, but soon after you start up it gets hidden with all the other pointless icons.

You can get it here:

www.bbshare.com

and if you google it, you'll find it's safe -- has been reviewed at google, in fact.

With Firefox Adblock, you can blanket block certain bits of url, like *doubleclick*, which gets rid of a lot of stuff, and there's a bit of url that all the nasty flashers at Ancestry have in them, so you can knock them all out in one fell swoop. Then, when I'm reading a page and something is annoying me, I just right click on it and block it.

I actually block all extraneous images everywhere, on the assumption that it speeds loading -- e.g. Ancestry's leaves and stars for strength of matches, the file folder icons in thread lists here, etc etc.

Firefox and tabs are the best. I have one window in which I have a separate tab for each UK census year, one window with separate tabs for the three kinds of B, M and D indexes at Ancestry, one window with a couple of GR tabs and FreeBMD and the IGI and some googles, two or three windows with the multiple tabs of online documents I'm using for work at any given moment -- I used to have 40 or 50 windows open at a time and I'd constantly lost track of what was where and end up opening another copy of whatever I was looking for. ;)

And so to work ...

Huh! I'm a firefox devotee -- and this doesn't happen to me!

What does happen is the subject line gets truncated. My fave of the day is the one in trying-to-find where some is looking for a person born c189 ... yes ...?

Speaking of how things oughta look, though, have we all installed Firefox's Adblocker, and are we thrilled at being to eliminate all the flashing noise and irrelevant picture content from our screen?

For IE users, you want No Flash, a tiny perfect little thing that blocks adobe flash ads and can be found and installed by googling "no flash".

I pays my money, I don't need to be looking at ads for cell phones and house insurance in a country where I don't even live, and wondering what the site owners (Ancestry is the worse for this) will do when the reports of epileptic seizures brought on by the flashing start coming in ...

Anyhow, while we're here:

DO NOT WRITE YOUR SUBJECT LINES IN ALL CAPS.

Cheeses, that's rude. Of course, do not write your posts in all caps, either. I think trying-to-find is worst for that, as it is for most things.

Hi Huia

It's very unhelpful when it is the surname that disappears off the edge!!


sylvia

When choosing a title for your thread, try not to make it too long, otherwise it can be difficult to read things on the thread as the lines go off the right edge of the screen. Or at least they do with Mozilla Firefox. I switched to Microsoft Internet Explorer and found I could read whole lines again, but if anybody else is solely with some provider such as Mozilla Firefox, it could make life difficult.