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A year after Zuiker
Chronicles Online went live (in July 2000), I put up the About
Us page (an about page, say the authors of We Blog, is the typical
way bloggers build trust, by "going to great lengths to describe
themselves" p. 51). My about page included the following explanation:
Zuiker Chronicles
Online, at www.zuikerchronicles.com, is a website community
for the extended North American Zuiker family. We invite
you to visit this website to learn more about us.
...
For many decades various members of the Zuiker family, starting
with Francis Zuiker, have written and distributed newsletters
titled Zuiker Chronicles. Most often, these newsletters
shared the happenings of the author and his or her nuclear family.
But just as often they detailed the travels and travails of
the larger family -- the marriages and vacations, reunions and
jamborees. As Francis was nearing the end of his amazing life,
we began an online version of the Zuiker Chronicles. Zuiker
Chronicles Online is dedicated to the memory of Frank the Beachcomber,
Frank the writer and Frank the creative patriarch. See the tribute
to him.
When I created Zuiker
Chronicles Online in July 2000, I had two reasons:
- to create a Zuiker
family portal; and
- as a personal challenge
to learn website design
In the initial months,
I muddled through Dreamweaver and Netscape Composer and FirstPage2000.
My web page designs were inconsistent and updates infrequent. (See
archived designs here: Nov.
2000, April
2001, Oct.
2001.)
When my Grandfather passed
away, my relatives exchanged many e-mail messages with tributes
to Frank the Beachcomber. I collected these and posted them to a
tribute
page on the site, along with a link to the Chicago Tribune obituary.
This became very popular with my family, and many of my relatives
commented at the funeral about how touching it was to read the tributes
on the web. At the funeral gathering my relatives showed a deep
interest in the photographs of my grandfather and in the genealogy
of the family. I took note of this.
In the Fall of 2000,
I learned about blogs, and I quickly converted my site to Blogger.
My use of blogging allowed me to frequently update my site, and
this allowed me to more regularly invite my family members to the
site. After Christmas 2000, I incorporated a comments system. Blogger
served my purposes well, by allowing me to keep the content of the
site fresh. This gave me time to explore other software tools and
design methods.
In this time I tried
a chat room, bulletin board, listserv ("One of the most straightforward
ways of creating an online community," Preece p. 237), and
calendar, and I made available web-based e-mail and a personal web
page builder for any user. None of these caught on. This was because
I had only a handful of regular readers -- my parents and brothers,
and a few college friends. (I used Hitbox
for site stats.)
I've long understood
that a good strategy to increasing the use of Zuiker Chronicles
Online by my family is to draft the younger members of the family
to use the site more often. However, my hesitations to do this without
a firm privacy policy protecting children on the site have hindered
this development of a larger user base.
Once, one of my brothers
posted to the bulletin board -- but under my father's name! This
made me realize that even a family website needs policies, guidelines
and rules.
I did incorporate a photolog
into the site. Essentially, this is a weblog but with photographic
images as the posts. This became a popular feature of the site.
In the Fall of 2001,
I made the switch to Movable Type. Again, this was partly a selfish
action, because I wanted to increase my programming skills by learning
cgi scripts. Like other new users of Movable Type, I struggled through
the installation process. I used the support forums of movabletype.org
to find important tips. I now regularly read the support forums
to keep tabs of tips and hints and new features and plugins.
Movable Type, as the
authors of We Blog note, offers power and flexibility (p. 129).
This encouraged me to simplify my site design while also adding
important new features such as a family tree and better bulletin
board (movabletype.org's support forums use the freeware ikonboard,
and I decided to implement
that as well).
Just before I installed
Movable Type, I had purchased a digital camera. With Movable Type,
my photolog
was much easier to administer, especially since MT automatically
created a thumbnail image and wrote the code for a popup image.
I use the e-mail notification
feature of Movable Type to alert a list of people (some I subscribed,
others self-subscribed) to my new posts. I do this about once a
week, even though I post more frequently. It's a useful tool for
reminding readers to come back to my site.
As of November 2, 2002,
I have posted 445 entries through Blogger and Movable Type in the
two years since I first discovered blogging.
continue to Zuiker
community
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