Genealogy Tool Box
Week 5 (I think) was about building/creating a genealogy tool box. A virtual place to store all your websites (outside of the top sites like ancestry, fold3, family search)
Well I've dabbled in all of the options mentioned in this week's topic.
First and the most difficult (IMO) is the external list method.
This is where you keep a separate sheet in excel /or word or worse on paper to keep all of your links.
For me, this method is cumbersome way to keep track. One would have to take the spreadsheet with them (or have it online somewhere) and if storing it online is the goal, there are much easier ways than a spreadsheet or document. Another thing to think about is, does the computer you will be using somewhere else, have the software to open the document/spreadsheet. Even with Google docs, some public computers are blocking the use of google docs, so now we have this wonderful list of places to search, but alas, we don't have access.
Now let's move on to what most people would say is obvious, a browser's bookmarks. While they work great for a one computer use, however with the new updates coming out for browsers, bookmarks may be portable.
One of the suggestions was to build a weebly site, which I tried, and even with my website building background, I found it cumbersome and hard to manipulate the book marks I already had. So I scrapped that after about a week of beating my head against the wall.
Way back in the day I came across a website I absolutely loved. It was called back flip. It was a site you logged into and you could log the sites you visited with the click of a button. There was a place to give the site a name, a description as well as the link. This was any computer you went to, all you had ot do was log into back flip and poof! there were all your links. I loved back flip and promoted it to everyone, this was "cloud computing" in its infancy. I'm sad to report, back flip fell by the wayside.
So fast forward a few years and we now have Icrumz.
This setup is similar to back flip. It is a website where you set up a free account, and then you drag a icon to your toolbar.
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| Icrumz icon |
Any website you visit, can be added to Icrumz, by clicking on that icon. So I can be on face book, see a link I want to save, click on the link, then click on the icon. The links in Icrumz can be moved around with in a folder, or across folders. If you are at another pc, just log onto Icrumz and your links are there, drag the icon to the top of the tool bar, and you can save additional websites you find.
So if you want something easy to use, with no learning curve, Icrumz is the answer.
