What's New

• lkessler.com: 13,912 sessions, down 12%. Max 130 on May 17.
• beholdgenealogy.com: 31,860 sessions, down 7%. Max 1,109 on Aug 29.
• gensoftreviews.com: 141,914 sessions, down 10%. Max 1,091 on Apr 18.

• lkessler.com: 15,886 sessions, up 20%. Max 195 on Oct 31.
• beholdgenealogy.com: 34,212 sessions, up 42%. Max 430 on Dec 14.
• gensoftreviews.com: 158,108 sessions, up 38%. Max 1,415 on Jan 3.
• jhcwc.org: 3,680 sessions up to Aug 29 when the site was moved.

Sat, Dec 19, 2015

• I joined the International Society of Genetic Genealogists and added the ISOGG logo to my Behold home page
• Updated my Genealogical Activities page adding the ISOGG and bringing a few other things up to date.
• Updated my Speakers Topics page, bringing it up to date and adding my 2016 talks.

Sat, Dec 5, 2015

• Updated my Jewish Genealogy Links with a new Jewish DNA Research section.

Mon, Sep 28, 2015

• Put new Quantcast widgets on my home page that includes a 3 month Sparkline of traffic.

Fri, Aug 28, 2015

• After developing, hosting and maintaining the JHCWC website for the organization for 16 years, I redirected the JHCWC site to point to the new site being developed for them by Visual Lizard, so the organization will in the future be able to add their content themself.

Thu, Jul 23, 2015

• I fixed the pagenation of searches on the Behold Blog and Forum and on GenSoftReviews when the search term is an exact phrase enclosed in double quotes.

Tue, Jun 30, 2015

• New version 1.1 of Behold put up, with updates to most of the web pages on the Behold site to include new screen shots and update descriptions.
• New format for Behold's Future Plans page. No longer dates and versions. Just next version (no date) and other plans.'

Tue, Apr 28, 2015

• I've put up a an archive of all my tweets and linked to it with a few statistics from my home page.

Sat, Apr 18, 2015

• Updated the Behold FAQ to reflect that Behold runs under PlayOnMac on a Mac, and updated the wording on that FAQ and a few others.

Tue, Apr 14, 2015

• Updated my Focsaner family tree online with the name found for my great-great grandmother Dwora Naftulovitz and other related information.

Tue, Jan 13, 2015

• Included the "Note: This site encrypts the password you enter here, so it cannot be determined." on my Behold site for registering or changing passwords.

Fri, Jan 2, 2015

• Recoded the GenSoftReviews Award Winners page so that unsupported programs can't qualify as a Users Choice Award.
• Added the 2014 GenSoftReviews Users Choice Winners to the GenSoftReviews website, and updated the Award Winners page.

2014 - Highlights of my Web Site's 17th Year

• lkessler.com: 13,253 sessions, down 23.5% (adjusting +3,300 for Aug 4 - Nov 7 data loss)
• beholdgenealogy.com: 24,103 sessions, up 39.7% (adjusting -3,300 for Aug 4 - Nov 7 data gain)
• gensoftreviews.com: 114,289 sessions, up 50.7%
• jhcwc.org: 5,135 sessions, down 6.6%

Wed, Nov 26, 2014

• Finally found a nice weather widget that is non-flash and includes the South Pole from www.theweather.com. Added Winnipeg, Thompson, Churchill and the South Pole widgets back into my home page.
• Found some CSS code to make the four widgets dynamic, so that on smaller screens it would switch to only be 2 widgets per line instead of all 4.

Sat, Nov 22, 2014

• Changed the web page title of my Behold Blog pages to include the Post title in the same format as used in the Behold Forum.
• Changed the web page title of my GenSoftRevies pages to include the software name (ie. Post title) in the same format as done for the Behold pages.

Mon, Nov 17, 2014

• The recording of Behold purchases into my database stopped working. Netfirms changed their "mysqlhost" setting a years ago and I missed changing it my purchase recording PHP script. Netfirms just invalidated the old "mysqlhost" setting, so it just stopped working. Because it's 3 years later, I completely forgot that this was done and it took a couple of hours to find the problem.
• Then I discovered that the PHP program to manually add a new person in my Behold purchaser/trier database wasn't working. It only took me 3 hours to find that $_POST("email") needed to be $_POST["email"]). See the difference?

Tues, Nov 11, 2014

• Added GEDCOM File Finder info snippets and links to its page onto to my Behold site, near the bottom of the right column of the main page, the footer of every page, the download page and the feedback page.

Thu, Nov 6, 2014

• My Google Analytics tracking code for lkessler.com was incorrect and was the one for beholdgenealogy.com. So all my tracking got merged there. I've now corrected the lkessler.com code and separate tracking should now start. Bother!

Wed, Nov 5, 2014

• Uploaded my new freeware program: GEDCOM File Finder on my Behold site and made it available for downloading.
• Added my GEDCOM File Finder page to describe it.
• Added a Behold landing page for those who press the "Try Behold" link in the GEDCOM File Finder application.
• Third time's a charm! The Google Analytic download and outbound link tracking I added Tuesday didn't work as well. Both Sunday and Tuesday's code I found out was for the old version of Google Analytics which was deprecated last year. So I found one that actually works at axllent.org that now works!

Tue, Nov 4, 2014

• The Google Analytic download and outbound link tracking I added Sunday didn't seem to be working. I found a different one at: http://www.analyticsmarket.com/freetools/link-tagger and I'm trying that instead.

Sun, Nov 2, 2014

• Added dynamic Google Analytic download and outbound link tracking using the code at: http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2013/03/how-to-track-downloads-in-google-analytics-v2 to both my Behold site and my GensoftReviews site. It also required the inclusion of jQuery. I've included the compressed, production jQuery 1.11.1, from http://jquery.com/download/

Sun, Nov 2, 2014

• Added dynamic Google Analytic download and outbound link tracking using the code at: http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2013/03/how-to-track-downloads-in-google-analytics-v2 to both my Behold site and my GensoftReviews site. It also required the inclusion of jQuery. I've included the compressed, production jQuery 1.11.1, from http://jquery.com/download/

Thu, Oct 30, 2014

• I became a member and added the Association of Software Professionals logo to the bottom of my Behold home page.

Mon, Oct 13, 2014

• Updated my Speaker page with my talk from Gaenovium and with the 2nd paper submitted to FHISO.

Wed, Sept 24, 2014

• Accuweather's weather widget stopped working. I looked around for another suitable minimalistic weather widget, but couldn't find any that display multiple sites, including the South Pole, that changed shape well together for different sized windows. So I just removed them.

Sat, Sept 6, 2014

• Updated My Family web page with info about the Focsaners coming from the town of Ungureni in Romania, from the Hamburg Passenger records.

Fri, Aug 29, 2014

• The country names and flags displayed on the Behold blog user comments were incorrect. I updated to the latest database of ip2nation but they were still wrong. With the Netfirms file manager, I was able to fix it by deleting the cache directory: blog/wp-content/cache/ip2nation
• Fixed problem where results from the blog and forum search on my Behold site was giving a full page view in IE 8 and below. The customized search page inadvertently left out the include for the bb header, and surprisingly, that only caused problems in older IE versions. Firefox and Chrome and IE10 were fine.
• Improve the login form setup for the Behold blog and forum so that the fieldnames and the corresponding box stays on the same line. This looks better on smaller screen devices.

Sun, Aug 24, 2014

• De-emphasized that Mac and Mobile versions of Behold are planned by removing it from the first paragraph of the Behold home page. They are still planned, but a lot of other things are planned first.

Sun, Aug 3, 2014

• Updated my Google Analytics tracking code on my sites, as I see there is new code recommended. Maybe it will finally get the tracking on the Behold buy now pages to work.

Sat, Aug 2, 2014

• Changed all references on my Behold Buy Now pages from Plimus to BlueSnap, since the company has changed its branding and the old urls soon will not work.

Fri, Aug 1, 2014

• Changed the default check box for receiving Behold News on the Behold download page to be unchecked to conform to Canada's new anti-spam legislation.

Sat, Jun 26, 2014

• Updated the Google Plus badge on my homepage. The previous tag was centered and I couldn't change it to be left justified. So I picked a new standard tag showing my avatar, background picture, tagline, number of followers and follow button.

Wed, Jul 23, 2014

• Added my Gaenovium and RootsTech speakers badges to my speaker page.

Fri, Jun 6, 2014

• Updated my speaker page.
• Updated the CopyGator link on my Behold Blog page. The icon wasn't showing and the url I was using may have been deprecated.

Mon, Mar 31, 2014

• Set up a 404 Error Not Found page up for https://www.lkessler.com/404.shtml and gensoftreviews.com and jhcwc.org.
• Streamlined the 404 Error page for beholdgenealogy.com.

Sat, March 29, 2014

• Fixed my Behold Comments RSS Feed which wasn't working since August. Another one of those "»" type on entries in the Title of the comment. This also happened a couple of years ago (see May 14, 2012) but I had forgotten the reason until I just fixed it now. If it happens again, I'll have to add something to my Wordpress feed to prevent this.

Sun, January 15, 2014

• The Software Industry Professionals site no longer works and my queries to them the last few months have got no response. I've removed them from my Behold home page and likely will not renew membership.

Sun, January 12, 2014

• On GenSoftReviews, now Genealogy Software Reviews awards are shown as gold only if they won in 2013. Silver for past winners.

Sat, January 4, 2014

• On GenSoftReviews, replaced the link to Genealogy Q&A on StackExchange with a link to my blog post: How Good are GenSoftReview Ratings?

Wed, January 1, 2014

• Moved the weather data to the bottom of my home page in a section now called Brrr!
• Used the Canada/US visited states map generated by Defocus.net, which shows colors for how regular a visitor you are. They don't have a world map though.

2013 - Highlights of my Web Site's 16th Year

• lkessler.com: 17,317 visits, down 38.9%
• beholdgenealogy.com: 17,251 visits, up 7.3%
• gensoftreviews.com: 75,855 visits, up 4.0%
• jhcwc.org: 5,501 visits, down 9.0%

Sun, December 22, 2013

• Managed to make changes to my Behold Blog so that I can add or edit posts from the WordPress for Windows Phone App. The app worked fine with GenSoftReviews with no changes needed.

Sat, December 21, 2013

• Switched the weather information on my Home Page from the Weather Network for Winnipeg and WeatherUnderground for the South Pole to use a clean Accuweather call courtesy of netweather.accuweather.com.
• Added Thompson and Churchill temps as well.

Sun, December 15, 2013

• Just to make sure, I've deleted the WordPress installation from the JHCWC site. It was only there to test in case I wanted to eventually migrate the site to WordPress, but I'll have to do that work again now if I decide to in the future.
• ... and a datemod.php file somehow appeared (maybe before I deleted everything) with the same data as my valid datemod.js file, and the log file appeared again. Deleted both and looking for other differences. Ugh! Hopefully that happened before I finished deleting the WordPress installation. I'll have to check tomorrow.

Fri, December 13, 2013

• The JHCWC site was hacked with a backdoor WordPrss exploit, putting a log1.txt file in a log directory causing browsers to report the site as unsafe. The hack fix is described at www.daveexmachina.com/wordpress/?p=5875
• It seems like the small index.php stub file, as well as the wp-settings.php file had the closing "?>" at the end of it removed. It could have been the hack that did this, allowing anything appended to the index.php file to be processed by php, and maybe that's how the hack worked.
• There also appeared to be a wp-rss3.php file added, with encoded php code starting with "<?php $_8b7b="\x63\x72" and looking it up on the web, it becomes a php create function, that probably creates the log file and maybe does other stuff as well. This makes me pretty sure this is the exploit.

Sun, December 8, 2013

• Improved the look of my lkessler.com website pages on mobile devices by adding into each page's HEAD section the meta tag with: name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0". This prevents browsers on mobile devices from resetting all the font sizes. This was not necessary on my other sites which had Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the formatting.

Sat, December 7, 2013

• Added the RootsTech speaker badge to my Behold blog page.
• Removed the Bookup blurb on my Brute Force page. It looks more like a promotion for it there.
• Reorganized my Computer Chess Links page to put Aspects first, my own journey second, and move Challenges to the end.

Sun, November 10, 2013

• Changed the "Machine vs Machine" section to "Chess Engines" in my Chess and Computer Chess Links page and expanded it, including 4 specific engines: Houdini, Stockfish, Komodo and Critter.

Sat, November 9, 2013

• Finally addressed the registration of new users by Spam posters on the Behold User Forum by removing the URL as an entry field. It will reduce their desire to register now.
• Deleted over 1500 spam users from the Behold User Forum registered list.

Sun, November 3, 2013

• Reorganized my Computer Chess Links page, with Aspects of Programming Chess now first.
• Removed Snap Shots from the Computer Chess, Jewish Genealogy, and Jewish Winnipeg links pages.

Sun, October 20, 2013

• The Snap Shots service now has an expired Comodo certificate on its site. I was using it for small website image previews on GenSoftReviews and a couple of pages on the Behold site, but those now will not show up. Even worse, Internet Explorer gives a nasty warning message stating a certificate has expired and the content won't be shown. That's bad, as most users will think it's something wrong with my site. I gave feedback to Snap Shots, and we'll see if they fix it. In the meantime, I've disabled the Snap Shots on my sites.

Thu, October 17, 2013

• Improvements to the About.me site allowed me to update my About.me page with links to my Twitter, Google Plus and Behold blog feeds, as well as include keywords. About.me looks like its trying to become something significant.

Sun, June 23, 2013

• Replaced the non-working Twitter and Google Plus widgets on my home page with new working ones.

Sat, June 22, 2013

• Updated my speaker page with a list of my recent talks and new topics.
• Updated my genealog page with new informtaion.

Tue, June 18, 2013

• Added "Where I've Been" maps of the world, Canada and the USA at the bottom of my home page.

Wed, Mar 27, 2013

• Set the Behold webserver 404 Error page to /404.php so that it would again show my custom "Not Found" page. This wasn't working for a long time, at least since I changed to Netfirms.

Tue, Mar 19, 2013

• Added the Genealogy and Family History logo to the sidebar of my Behold Blog.

Sat, Feb 2, 2013

• Updated my Stackexchange "flair" buttons for Genealogy and Stack Overflow on the Behold home page because the older iframe-based widgets stopped working.

Thu, Jan 24, 2013

• Updated my Speakers Topics page with some descriptions of some of the topics and a link to my Association of Professional Genealogists profile.

Sun, Jan 6, 2013

• Updated the GenSoftReviews FAQ to specify more strictly that only reviews/ratings are allowed, developers should not post, and developers are encouraged to tell their users to review their program.
• Added a link at the top of GenSoftReviews header to my Can Genealogy Software Be Rated Fairly? blog post.
• Navigation links at the top of the GenSoftReviews About, FAQ, Links and Suggest pages were fixed.

Tue, Jan 1, 2013

• Behold receives honourable mention for Best New Genealogy Software in Tamura Jones' GeneAwards 2012.
• Fixed the header of all the GenSoftReviews pages that was not displaying the Select/Sort forms properly in one line in Google Chrome.
• Updated the GenSoftReviews awards for 2012. Took out multiple years in title. Changed "Best Liked Genealogy Software" to "Top Rated Genealogy Software" and changed that line's color from gold to green. Changed the link of the award graphics from previously linking to the awards page to now linking to the software's page at GenSoftReviews. Numbered the winners, and separated out the past winners.

2012 - Highlights of my Web Site's 16th Year

• lkessler.com: 28,322 visits, 42,603 pageviews
• beholdgenealogy.com: 16,084 visits, 51,763 pageviews
• gensoftreviews.com: 72,904 visits, 158,810 pageviews
• jhcwc.org: 6,043 visits, 10,251 pageviews

Tue, Dec 25, 2012

• The Google+ widget I added last year on the Behold blog sidebar no longer worked, so I replaced it with a Google+ image and link instead.
• Removed the Urlfan link on my Behold blog sidebar. The site has not done anything re blog analytics since I tried them in 2009.
• Added ?rel="author" into my Google+ links on the Behold blog sidebar and on my Home Page to see if that that will provide Google authorship.
• Added two "complete series" DVDs to the Mummies Alive Toys page.

Wed, Nov 7, 2012

• Today is the 10th "blogiversary" of my first Behold Blog post, and I posted my 815th blog post today.

Wed, Oct 17, 2012

• Changed the line in the header of the GenSoftReviews site to go to the new Genealogy Q&A site now that the proposal has gone to public beta.

Sun, Oct 14, 2012

• Added a flair icon for the Genealogy and Family History Q&A site onto the "Expertise" section of the Behold home page.
  
• Left the "Find the Best" link but removed the "Find the Best" badge from the same "Expertise" section.

Mon, Oct 8, 2012

• Referred 100 committers to the Genealogy and Family History Q&A site on Stack Exchange.

Sat, Sep 29, 2012

• After 3 years and 11 months, 127 questions and 202 answers, I reached 10,000 reputation at Stack Overflow.

Fri, Sep 27, 2012

• Added some spam prevention on the Behold Forum to prevent some types if spammers from creating an account.

Sun, Aug 26, 2012

• Made some improvements to the layout of the Behold Forum, to allow it to respond to a smaller screen size a bit better. But I really like the table setup and I don't want to compromise that - so most people will have to use the main Forum page in landscape mode.
• Made improvements to the display of the Login line on both the Behold Blog and Forum, so that words and the person's name won't break in the middle.
• Note: Still to do are the Behold Buy Now page, and the User Guide.
• Added a line in the header of the GenSoftReviews site to promote the Genealogy Q&A site proposal at StackExchange.

Wed, Aug 22, 2012

• Added Spam Prevention to the Behold User Forum. Posts with web addresses in them are now held for moderation prior to posting.

Mon, Aug 20, 2012

• Added Responsive Web Design to my Behold site. This allows the site to be "Mobile friendly". Just a few wide images, the forum, and the User Guide have a bit of design work left.

Tues, Aug 14, 2012

• Updated the Behold Home Page with less raw-raw and more to the point info about Behold. Included info about it reading GEDCOM, which was somehow missing, and its error checking capabilities. Also foretold of plans for mobile versions.
• I don't know why all the Behold headers in the Behold Help file changed to point to the Plimus secure graphics files which made them all missing graphics, but I've now fixed that. Weird!
• Changed the Behold CSS file so that list items would have 5 pixels after each entry. That adds a nice amount of white space between entries and makes the Behold Future Plans and History pages look better.
• The online Behold User Guide had some references to a UG directory, which didn't exists, so I created the directory with a redirect file to the UserGuide directory.

Sun, Aug 12, 2012

• Aaargh! Two graphics on the Behold Buy Now page, including the Behold Header, somehow no longer pointed to the secure graphic at Behold and made them missing. The Buy Now page was damaged. I'm sure that turned off potential purchasers. Don't know how long it was that way, or why that link broke. But it's now fixed.
• Purchased the domain names: beholdgenealogy.mobi and behold.mobi

Sun, Jun 3, 2012

• Updated my Computer Chess Links adding a Machine vs Machine section and a few new links, including links to the Computer Chess section of the Computer History Museum, as well as the Chess Programming wiki at Wikispaces.
• I changed the Adwords Ad at the top of my Computer Chess Links page to a link to Computer Chess Books at Amazon, as is on the Jewish Genealogy links page. Did this because the Adwords ad was not generating ads relevant to computer chess anymore.

Thu, May 31, 2012

• Added an APG (Association of Professional Genealogists) logo to my Behold Home Page with a link to my profile on the APG site.

Mon, May 14, 2012

• Fixed the Behold Blog Comments RSS Feed, which started producing a "This feed contains code errors" message after an HTML entity ampersand-laquo that produces a left-pointing double angle quotation: "«" was entered in an April 16th comment. This one drove me crazy for a while, and I fixed everything else in the feed before I found that.

Sat, May 5, 2012

• Updated the GenSoftReviews FAQ, added #1 "What is this site for?", rewrote a few rules such as deletion and developer posting and reordered the FAQs more logically.

Thu, May 3, 2012

• Changed the "title" of the Behold home page from "BEHOLD Genealogy Software" to "Behold Genealogy Software". I expect the capitalized BEHOLD has been a bad idea for search engine placement, since the page probably gets penalized for the all-caps. Also changed "BEHOLD Screenshots" to "Behold Screenshots"

Sun, Apr 29, 2012

• Modified the display of trackbacks (i.e. other sites that link to my post) on my Behold Blog to be multiple lines with the second line showing the text from the site. I've also hacked the code to allow me to better manage those links and add those that don't get automatically.
• Also made some improvements to the Behold Blog RSS Comments feed, to display the links better.

Wed, Apr 25, 2012

• For 4 days, there were no reviews at GenSoftReviews. Something changed preventing the display of the comment form. Changing the settings to allow comments wouldn't fix it. This was the old "have to reset each message bug" that pops up from time to time. Ugh. It's been a while. Hope it doesn't happen again soon.

Fri, Apr 13, 2012

• Added more information about the en passant problem I had to my Brute Force page.

Fri, Apr 6, 2012

• I tweeted my 1000'th tweet.

Fri, Mar 30, 2012

• Added my Speakers Topics page to give my profile and list of topics I'll speak about. This page also has my picture to go along with my profile.
• My picture has also been added to the "About Me" section in the sidebar of my Behold blog

Fri, Mar 9, 2012

• Reached 1000 days with visits to Stack Overflow in just over 3 years.

Tues, Feb 14, 2012

• Added the FindTheBest badge to Behold's home page.

Sat, Feb 11, 2012

• GenSoftReviews was only showing the last 19 reviews on the first page instead of the last 20. That is now fixed.

Wed, Feb 8, 2012

• Added the "Compatible with Windows 7" logo to the Behold home page and updated the Behold FAQ about it.

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 to Mon, Feb 6, 2012

• Blogged about my attendence at RootsTech 2012, from I'll Be At RootsTech to Final Thoughts.

Mon, Jan 30, 2012

• I added my GeneaBloggers affiliation to my Behold Blog page. (I should have done that long ago).

Mon, Jan 16, 2012

• Paypal is now available again at Behold's Buy Now page. Plimus got their Advanced system, so they ended up letting users like me get stranded for a month.

2011 - Highlights of my Web Site's 15th Year

• Quantcast Stats for 2011 (in people per day):
  • lkessler.com: 51 ppd, max 268 on Oct 31.
  • beholdgenealogy.com: 22 ppd, max 447 on Nov 26.
  • gensoftreviews.com: 125 ppd, max 312 on Nov 1.
  • jhcwc.org: 12 ppd, max 45 on Apr 26.
• Stackoverflow: Asked 17 more questions (now 119). Gave 30 more answers (now 197). Earned 2163 more points (now 8608) and 45 more badges (now 135).
• GenSoftReviews Programs: Increased 39 programs (now 595). There were 287 more user reviews (now totalling 1009).
• Behold blog: Added 65 blog entries. The total is now 829.
• Twitter: Made 822 tweets.
• Nov 2011 - Behold Version 1.0 was released.
• Oct 2011 - Updated my about.me/lkessler page.
• Jul 2011 - Migration of website at Netfirms.
• Jul 2011 - Signed up for Google+.
• Feb 2011 - Signed up for Twitter.

Sat, Dec 31, 2011

• Reworked the Users Choice Awards page at GenSoftReviews from two columns down to one, to now list each program once with all years of its awards together.
• GenSoftReviews now includes the award graphic in the program page for each winning program.

Fri, Dec 16, 2011

• Put a notice up on the Behold Buy Now page that PayPal is temporarily not available as a payment option.

Fri, Dec 9, 2011

• PayPal stopped working as a Payment option on my Behold Buy Now page.

Mon, Nov 28, 2011

• Made the Behold User Guide available as a PDF download on the Behold download page.

Sun, Nov 27, 2011

• Streamlined the Get Key section of the Behold Download page, and added an option box to allow opting out of getting Behold News.
• Also fixed a little problem after hitting the "Send Key", where an intermediate page with a Continue button would pop up for a fraction of a second. No longer happens.

Sat, Nov 26, 2011

• Changed to https://www.beholdgenealogy.com, primarily moving the "What is Behold" section from the right column to the main column as the 3rd paragraph.

Thu, Nov 24, 2011

• Released Version 1.0 of Behold!
• Updated all the Behold web pages to bring them out of beta and into "full release" mode.

Wed, Nov 23, 2011

• Updated my Genealogical Activities page. It hadn't been updated since December 30, 2006.

Thu, Oct 27, 2011

• Updated my Quantcast Tag on my webpages to their new asynchronous tag to improve page loading performance by loading the quant code in the background and only on the first pageview per session.

Thu, Oct 6, 2011

• Updated my About Me page at: about.me/lkessler with a wonderful picture taken out my back window.

Mon, Sep 5, 2011

• The September 2nd confirmation page problem is now fixed. At the new Netfirms, cURL seems to work sometimes, and seems to not work other times. I replaced the cURL code with a hidden form that auto-executes using JavaScript to bring up the confirmation page. For those without Javascript, they’ll simply have to hit a “Continue” button to get there.

Sun, Sep 4, 2011

• Updated my StackOverflow profile to put a nicer description on their User Card

Fri, Sep 2, 2011

• A Netfirms migration glitch was discovered that caused the Behold "Send Key" command to result in a delayed response followed by a blank page result, instead of the confirmation page. A solution to this is now being worked on, but until then, a "Yes it is working" message has been added below the "Send Key" button.

Fri, Aug 12, 2011

• Added to the Behold download page, an area where Behold Translation files can be downloaded. First file is Dutch.bho, contributed by Hendrik Acket.

Thu, Jul 28, 2011

• Added a Google+ Widget to my home page and to my Behold blog page.
• Took the tweets about me box off my home page.

Tue, Jul 26, 2011

• Netfirms was purchased by Endurance International Group back in March. All websites were to be moved to a new platform on Endurance's servers. The migration of all my websites were completed on this day, and the migration went reasonably well.

Sun, Jul 10, 2011

• Signed up for Google+.

Thu, May 12, 2011

• From GenSoftReviews, modified a couple of dozen program descriptions and removed 11 programs that no longer exist.
• Updated the GenSoftReviews Links page, removing invalid links.

Tues, May 3, 2011

• Removed the "verify e-mail" line from Behold Buy Now page.
• Fixed Behold BuyNow page which would give a non-sensical "Password Does Not Match" error message when using IE9 in IE9 standards mode. See my blog post on this.

Mon, May 2, 2011

• Updated the Behold Screenshots page.
• Also updated the screenshot on the Behold home page.

Sun, May 1, 2011

• Removed the "verify e-mail" line from Behold Buy Now page.
• Fixed Behold BuyNow page which would give a non-sensical "Password Does Not Match" error message when using IE9 in IE9 standards mode. See my blog post on this.
• Added Behold's User Guide to the Behold website.
• Changed Behold guarantee from 30 days to 60 days.

Tue, Feb 22, 2011

• Fixed GenSoftReviews so that new reviews are once again displayed with most recent once first. This was broken in the Jan 4, 2011 update.

Fri, Feb 11, 2011

• Moved Genealogy Software Reviews to its own section on My Home Page.
• Added Discussion section to My Home Page with two Twitter gadgets to show my tweets and tweets involving me.
• Added a "Follow Me On Twitter" link to my Behold Blog page.
  

Thu, Feb 10, 2011

• Signed up for Twitter as louiskessler.

Mon, Jan 10, 2011

• Awarded the 2nd Annual GenSoftReviews User Choice Awards for 2010 to 8 programs.

Fri, Jan 7, 2011

• Updated my Behold FAQ, specifically regarding computer requirements (64 bit is fine, and no real time or memory issues any more) and added a licensing question "Can I Install Behold on More Than One Computer?" and the Photos section indicating they'll now come after version 2. Also removed former question 2: "Why has it taken so long to get Behold out?"

Sun, Jan 4, 2011

• Major update to GenSoftReviews that included:
  1. Streamlined the "Add Your Review" form.
  2. No longer requires email address.
  3. Add Review now at top of each program's page.
  4. Eliminated five categories and now just have one overall rating.
  5. Now can display programs with >=10 reviews.
  6. Ratings entered with radio buttons rather than a drop down box.
  7. Reviews now selectable by year grouping: Overall, 2011, 2010 and earlier.
  8. Added the capability to easily update the year groupings each year.
  See my Behold blog entry for more info on this update.

2010 - Highlights of my Web Site's 14th Year

• Quantcast Stats for 2010 (in people per day):
  • lkessler.com: 54 ppd, max 432 on May 23.
  • beholdgenealogy.com: 24 ppd, max 132 on Dec 31.
  • gensoftreviews.com: 148 ppd, max 194 on Oct 5.
  • jhcwc.org: 11 ppd, max 487 on Jan 27.
• Stackoverflow: Asked 28 more questions (now 102). Gave 35 more answers (now 167). Earned 1052 more points (now 6445) and 45 more badges (now 90).
• GenSoftReviews Programs: Started year with 466 programs listed. Ended at 556 programs. Started year with 509 user reviews. Ended at 722 reviews.
• Behold blog: Added 54 blog entries.
• Sep/Oct 2010 - Secured www.behold.us and www.behold.asia
• Aug 2010 - First printed review of Behold.
• Apr 2010 - Used my unicorn avatar for awhile.
• Jan 2010 - First GenSoftReviews User Choice Awards given out

Thu, Dec 30, 2010

• Although I've have my Focsaner Family Tree page up privately on the web since March 29, 2009, today I've made it public by linking to it from my Home Page and My Family Research page.
• On the Behold Feedback page, I've added links to Behold Web Output that users have posted on their websites. This includes my Focsaner page.

Thu, Dec 16, 2010

• Removed the Genealogy Industry Metrics badge from my Behold Blog sidebar. It appears that Ning has now become a paid service and has closed the free forums it previously had.

Sat Dec 11, 2010

• Decided to add lines under the Winnipeg/South Pole weather each day Winnipeg's temperature is lower than the South Pole.

Mon Dec 6, 2010

• Added a Traffic Stats page showing Quantcast traffic graphs.
• Added a link on my Behold Blog to my participation in the BetterGEDCOM wiki effort

Sun Dec 5, 2010

• Finally fixed my filter to delete the url spam that has been plaguing GenSoftReviews. Instead of having to moderate each message, I'm now confident that the filter works 99.9% of the time and I can just get rid of them without worrying about them. So I'm good now until something new comes.

Fri Nov 26, 2010

• The Behold trial was temporarily unavailable between June 30, 2009 and Nov 30, 2009. During that time, I changed the request a trial key button to a "let me know when the beta is available" button. I changed that back to the trial key on Nov 30, 2009. But I neglected to change the line on the confirmation page from "Your name has been added to the Behold mailing list" to "Your User ID and License Key have been e-mailed" - so it was somewhat confusing for almost a year. That has now been fixed.

Sat Nov 20, 2010

• Added the South Pole weather to my home page again. I'll probably make this an annual event and add it every winter so Winnipeg temperature can be compared to the South Pole.
• Changed my Google GEDCOM search page to indicate it is just a Google search of GEDCOMs. It no longer is a Google custom search. I had changed that back on October 10, 2008, but not changed the text.

Fri Nov 19, 2010

• The GenSoftReviews RSS feed for new programs added was not giving new programs that didn't have a review yet. That has now been fixed.
• Also, improved the titles of the two GenSoftReviews feeds.

Sat Nov 6, 2010

• Added an RSS feed onto GenSoftReviews to give new programs added. This is now in addition to the new reviews feed and the reviews feed for specific programs.

Wed Nov 3, 2010

• Manually entered spam comments, up to 4 or 5 a day into GenSoftReviews has forced me to eliminate the website entry and only post messages immediately if they don't contain a url. Otherwise they are held for me to inspect and approve. They want their spammy websites posted, so making this impossible hopefully get them to slow down.

Thu Oct 21, 2010

• Managed to snatch www.behold.asia, and it also now redirects to www.beholdgenealogy.com.

Mon Oct 18, 2010

• www.behold.us became live today, and now redirects to www.beholdgenealogy.com.

Tues Sept 28, 2010

• Managed to secure the www.behold.us domain name.

Sat Aug 14, 2010

• First printed review of Behold, published in the August 2010 issue of the British magazine: Your FamilyTree.

Fri Apr 30, 2010

• On April 1, StackOverflow played an April fools joke on all participants and changed everyone's Avatar image to a Unicorn. I liked mine so much, I saved it and kept it for a whole month. Now I'm changing back to my Behold sun. But maybe every year on April 1st, I'll change my Avatar back again to my Unicorn, for the day, or a week, or maybe again the month.

Sat Jan 2, 2010

• Added the GenSoftReviews User Choice Awards page and selected the 8 most-liked programs of 2009. Each program was given an award graphic specifically designed for these awards.
• Added subtitles into the html Title of each GenSoftReviews page.
• Removed the Amazon books links at the bottom of each GenSoftReviews page. They weren't doing anything anyway.
• Changed the numbering of the reviews on the GenSoftReviews individual program pages so they number more logically upwards 20 at a time instead of downwards from the total number of reviews.

2009 - Highlights of my Web Site's 13th Year

• Quantcast Stats for 2009 (in people per day):
  • kessler.com: 64 ppd, max 570 on June 26.
  • beholdgenealogy.com: 28 ppd, max 48 on Dec 14.
  • gensoftreviews.com: 104 ppd, max 196 on Apr 3.
  • jhcwc.org: 24 ppd, max 402 on Dec 8.
• Stackoverflow (since Nov 2008): Asked 74 questions. Gave 132 answers. Earned 5593 points and 45 badges.
• GenSoftReviews (since Sept 2008): Started with 355 programs listed. Now at 466 programs. Users contributed 509 reviews.
• Behold blog: Added 63 blog entries.
• Dec 2009 - Behold was given a Most Improved Genealogy Product award.
• Nov 2009 - First beta version of Behold was released.
• Nov 2009 - New GenSoftReviews logo and favicon.
• Nov 2009 - Added South Pole to Winnipeg weather on Home Page.
• Feb 2009 - Signed up to Quantcast to get webstats.
• Jan 2009 - Bye bye to Myhosting (since 1998) and IXWebhosting (since 2006).

Thu Dec 31, 2009

• Behold was awarded an Honourable Mention for Most Improved Genealogy Product in the 2009 GeneAwards awarded by Tamura Jones.

Mon, Nov 30, 2009

• The first beta version, 0.99.1 beta of Behold has been released.

Tues, Nov 24, 2009

• New logo added for GenSoftReviews.
  
• By comparison, it replaced the original, which was:
  
• New favicon added for GenSoftReviews. It's one of the GenSoftReview stars now instead of the original abacus.

Sun, Nov 22, 2009

• Added the South Pole weather next to the Winnipeg weather on My Home Page, with the question underneath: "Where is it warmer today? Winnipeg or the South Pole?"
• Changed the stars used on GenSoftReviews to a new 3-D'ish star that will be part of the new logo when it is ready.

Sun, Nov 15, 2009

• Added my StackOverflow points badge under the title of "Expertise" at the bottom of my Behold Genealogy page.

Sun, Oct 25, 2009

• Updated my Computer Chess Links with new entries, including to the new World Chess Champions site, and added a new section "Games by Program" to contain entries into chessgames.com's online games database for some of the earlier programs.
• Fixed the copyright date and the CGI error that have existed at the bottom of my Computer Chess, Jewish Genealogy and Jewish Winnipeg Links pages since my switch from IXWebhosting to Netfirms.

Sun, Sept 27, 2009

• Added a Copygator link to my Behold Blog page to check out their service and to see what web content is referring to and/or using my blog content.\
• Also added a Urlfan link to my Behold Blog page to check out their service and to see what analytics information they provide. They say they are better than Alexa.

Mon, Sept 21, 2009

• Unfortunately, between August 5 and September 13, an error prevented user reviews from being added to GenSoftReviews. This was written up in my Blog and now is fixed.

Tue, June 30, 2009

• Trial for Behold temporarily became unavailable.

Wed, April 22, 2009

• Added "Also Find Me At..." below "About Me" on my Behold Blog. Included are my Home Page, GenSoftReviews, Stack Overflow, and Genealogy Industry Metrics.

Fri, March 6, 2009

• On my Behold site, I changed the "Independent Reviews" section of the main and feedback pages to "Published Opinions"..

Wed, March 4, 2009

• Fixed a WordPress bug that wouldn't update my Behold Comment's RSS feed or my GenSoftReviews RSS Feed. See my Behold Blog Entry that describes the bug and its fix.

Tues, February 3, 2009

• Now put on my home page the Quantcast badges for all 4 of my sites, showing the estimated monthly people of each, and removed the Alexa badge.
• Also adde a Quantcast tag to the bottom of the JHCWC home page.
• Added an Amazon.com widget to the bottom of the GenSoftReview pages.

Sun, February 1, 2009

• Signed up with Quantcast to get additional visitor statistics. I've added a badge on my home page with a link to the statistics. I also signed up beholdgenealogy.com, gensoftreviews.com and jhcwc.org, and I'll add buttons there once the statistics beginning tabulating.

Sat, January 10, 2009

• Got my Addams Survey, Mummies Survey, and SOMA petition pages to once again process the forms correctly. They weren't working since the switch to Netfirms and a nasty glitch prevented me from fixing these earlier.

Thu, January 8, 2009

• The PHP email problem was resolved by Netfirms. I don't know what they did.

Tues, January 6, 2009

• Problems for the last day or two on my new Netfirms account with the PHP Mail command giving an error. None of my e-mails from my websites are being sent. I'm working with Netfirms to resolve this. Hopefully they'll be fixed soon.
• Added dates and improved the User Reviews on the Behold Feedback page.

Thu, January 1, 2009

• Deleted my IXWebhosting account. I signed up there in Jan 2006 as a place for my MajorWork site (which I never really used), but later added jhcwc.org, beholdgenealogy.com and gensoftreviews to it.
• Cancelled my myhosting.com account. That one had my lkessler.com site since July 1998.

2008 - Highlights of my Web Site's 12th Year

• Dec 2008 - Moved all my sites: lkessler.com, beholdgenealogy.com, gensoftreviews.com and jhcwc.org to Netfirms.ca
• Dec 2008 - Won a GeneaBlog award for my Behold Blog.
• Sept 2008 - Replaced my Genealogy Software Links page with my Genealogy Software Reviews site at www.gensoftreviews.com
• Aug 2008- Converted the rest of the Behold site to its new design and moved it to www.beholdgenealogy.com.
• July 2008 - Converted the Behold forum to bbPress and customized and integrated it with the WordPress blog.
• April 2008 - Converted my Behold blog to WordPress using the new design for the Behold pages.
• Jan 2008 - Changed the background color and separators of my lkessler pages to the former Behold page colors.

Wed, December 31, 2008

• Moved lkessler.com from Myhosting.com to Netfirms. Removed the page counts at the bottom of the pages and added Google analytics.

Sun, December 28, 2008

• Switched webhosting and moved beholdgenealogy.com, gensoftreviews.com and jhcwc.org from IXWebhosting to Netfirms.
• Changed all pages at beholdgenealogy.com from .htm SSI pages to .php pages and created redirects so links to former pages would get to the correct php page.

Sat, December 20, 2008

• I was awarded a 2008 GeneaBlog Award by Tamura Jones for my Behold Blog. It won the title of "Deepest Genealogy Blog". He wrote: "It does not get more inside than this. Behold is not finished, yet Louis Kessler has been blogging about developing Behold since 2002. Subscribe to witness the birth of Behold version 1.0 real soon now, or just dig into years of posts about developing a genealogy program."
• Changed the Behold Blog archive listings (e.g. 2008) so that excerpts from ALL blog entries from each year are shown, rather than only 3 complete entries at a time - which was a pain because you'd have to page to browse them all.

Fri, December 5, 2008

• Reformatted the Behold Feedback reviews with a blue box style to make them look nicer.

Thu, December 4, 2008

• Started getting a few spam a day on Gensoftreviews that my CSS-based spam prevention was not handling. So had to reimplement a javascript spam prevention technique that I originally had. I had hoped to get away without it so that people without Javascript could still post, but due to the "evils" of the Internet, that is no longer possible.

Tues, November 11, 2008

• Moved the Search Box to the top of all the Behold Blog pages.
• My GenSoftReviews site is now highlighted on the WPReviewSite Customer Gallery.

Fri, October 10, 2008

• I changed my GEDCOM custom Google search into a simple form to search GEDCOMs on Google. The custom search never gave full results, so going directly to Google is much better. None-the-less, Google only has about 8500 GEDCOM files indexed. My custom search is still available at: www.lkessler.com/gedcomcustom.shtml for comparison.
• The confirmation page after sending a Behold trial key from the Behold download page left out your email address the first time the page is run. This led to confusion by users that the email was sent. I found out that PHP sessions don't get initialized on the first call, so the email address was not passed to the confirmation page. I replaced this code with PHP CURL calls to pass the address as a POST to the page, and that seems to now work.

Tues, October 7, 2008

• I've been a member of the Software Industry Professionals for a few years now, but I've just joined as a Gold Member, and now display the Gold Member click to verify logo on my Behold page.

Sat, October 4, 2008

• I've created a logo for GenSoftReviews as well as an associated favicon (the abacus image at the left of the logo) and updated the GenSoftReviews site with it. In the first 10 days, users have entered 214 reviews on the site.

Wed, September 24, 2008

• After 11 years and over 400,000 hits, I've replaced my Genealogy Software Links page with my Genealogy Software Reviews site at gensoftreviews.com. This will allow people to review and rate their software by 5 criteria. I've seeded it with 355 programs taken from my Software Links page. It is build on WordPress and has just 6 basic pages: The main page, a page for a program and its reviews, and About, FAQ, Links and Suggest. I've added the last five sections that used to be in my Genealogy Software Links page into the Links page.
• I've redirected my Genealogy Software Links url to that site.

Thu, September 11, 2008

• Put some antispam code into my Survey pages. We'll see if that helps cut down the spam or two a day I've been getting.

Wed, September 10, 2008

• Behold's Download page has been rewritten and is the last page needed to complete the new Behold site.
• The Behold Feedback [age now has all the reviews and opinions about Behold listed.

Tues, August 26, 2008

• Behold's new Feedback page is finished and up on the new site.
• The Behold Buy Now page at Plimus has been updated to use the new style.

Wed, August 13, 2008

• I've removed this site's summary page, that gave month to month hit statistics. After 4,000,000 hits in the past 10 years on all the pages of lkessler.com, those stats are less meaningful now that I'm moving the Behold pages away. But I learned a lot from keeping those stats, and it's amazing how randomly stable the Internet is.

Sat, August 9, 2008

• Converted most of the Behold pages to their new design. These include the Home, For You (used to be Features), Screenshots, FAQ, History and Future pages. The Blog and Forum were already there. Still to go are the Download, Buy Now and Feedback pages.
• Moved the pages to the BeholdGenealogy.com website, and placed redirects in the Behold

Mon, August 4, 2008

• The Behold Forum has now been completed. It uses bbPress 0.9 and is totally customized to match my Behold site style and fully integrated to work seamlessly with the Behold Blog, which has been upgraded to WordPress 2.5. Some of the many enhancements include:
  1. I removed from the Blog the custom field where you live. Now I detect the IP address instead and generate the country and flag of where you posted from automatically.
  2. The weather widget was very “expensive” in terms of slowing things down. It was a frill to have it on my blog. The weather icon I added to my personal home page at lkessler.com will do instead.
  3. I took the AJAX comment editor out of the Blog. I played around with all sorts of editing tools since then, including the TinyMCE editor to try to get entries done the same way for both Blog comments and Forum posts. I almost had TinyMCE working, including adding nice little smilies, but I found little problems with the results of the edit, with integration with my style, and with the icons they include. My conclusion was to just allow a simple text box entry as is default in both WordPress and bbPress and leave it at that.
  4. Complete integration of the Blog and Forum. Single registration and sign-in for them both.
  5. Custom date/time display, that lists post time as time elapsed if less than a week old, and gives the date otherwise.
  6. The search is available from both the Blog and the Forum. It is integrated and searches both the titles and contents of all Blog entries, Blog comments and Forum Posts. You can search for multiple words or include phrases in quotes. No words are ignored since it no longer uses the mySQL word index search.
  7. Once on the search results page, it lists excerpts from the found items with the text you searched for highlighted in yellow. You can then subselect the search into only Blog entreis, Blog comments and Forum posts if you want.
  8. The Forum main page shows the Four Forums as well as the most recent 30 topics.
  9. I’ve added four cute icons to represent the four Forums and I use them in many places.
  10. You can click on the headings of the topic list and sort by that item. Click again on the same one to sort in reverse order.
  11. Entries by me are highlighted in light blue. If you are logged in, then entries by you are highlighted in light orange. This is done throughout the Blog comments and Forum Topics and Posts.
  12. Blog Comments and Forum Posts have been made to look the same. For each, the user name, user id, location and flag, date joined, number of blog comments and forum posts, and date posted are shown. The user name will hyperlink to the user’s website if one was added to their profile. The number of comments and posts links to the search tool which will list them. I debated whether to add Avatars or Gravatars (pictures that represent you) but in the end I decided not to.
  13. There is a userlist available (if you are logged in) so you can see all the other registered users, their country, date joined, and number of comments and posts. Each column is sortable and you can click on their number of posts to get the list of them.
  14. The RSS feeds for both the Blog and Forum should all work well now. I found many bugs in the code from WordPress and bbPress that I fixed. This was not debugged that well by them.
  15. It is worthwhile to register and login. If you are logged in you can post, you get access to the user list, your posts get highlighted in light orange, and you get access to another menu on the Forum page that allows you to list only topics that you started, or only topics that you posted to.

Thu, July 17, 2008

• The Behold User Forum has been opened. It uses bbPress 0.8 and it uses the new sitedesign. The Forum and Blog share their login and registration system. Still more work to come before this is finished.

Sun, June 22, 2008

• Amazon changed the way their Web Services worked, and their custom coded lookups to get book info from their site recently stopped working completely. This affected my Home Page, my Computer Chess books page, and the Mummies Alive Toys page.
• On my Home Page, I removed my favorite book listing.
• On the Computer Chess books page, there were just three books linked with the Web Services, so I changed those to static links.
• On the Mummies Alive toys page, there were a few MA videos linked with the Web Services. I changed those, but also updated the video info, adding larger pictures and finding 3 new videos that now have been described.

Sun, June 15, 2008

• After playing around for a couple of months with a weather "bug" on my Behold Blog page, I finally decided to remove it from there, but to put a Weather Network weather button on my Home Page instead.
• Added a custom 404 Error - Not Found page to my beholdgenealogy site.

Tues, April 22, 2008

• Fixed the mail program for the Behold blog. It now works, so people can register and reset passwords.

Mon, April 21, 2008

• I've moved my Behold Genealogy Blog to be the first official page at the new www.beholdgenealogy.com domain. It now uses Wordpress 2.3 and allows logging in and comments. I've done a lot of customization to make it work the way I want. And it uses the new Behold site design.
• I've also made my first entry on the new Blog.
• There is a new RSS feed for the entries and another one for the comments.
• Some features of the Blog include:
  1. I've added a custom login line, that changes to welcome you if you're logged in.
  2. I've designed my own profile page, which is minimalistic and all that's needed.
  3. I've disabled the WordPress "nofollow" policy (I disagree with it) to allow your links to be counted in search engines.
  4. I've added a custom field for where you live, which will be displayed under your name if you leave comments
  5. The Registration and Lost ID/Password functions are very different, as they start with an email to you for verification first - preventing junk from robots and spam engines from mucking up the database. I've tried to make those procedures as user friendly as possible. I'm very happy with them.
  6. Normally WordPress sends you a random password, and you have to login and then go to your profile if you want to change it. But I've fixed it so that you can specify the password you want to use or change to.
  7. I've put recent entries and recent comments and a search and archives in my sidebar in the way that I think is most useful.
  8. The search function uses a really nice plugin that highlights your search terms in the results, and I've modified the way those results look. Eventually, I'll get the one search to also search the comments and the forum as well.
  9. I added all my old blog posts (about 600 of them) to the Archives section, and customized the way the archive pages look. I've also added blog comments that were in the old Behold Forum to the appropriate post as real WordPress comments.
  10. I added a cute litte weather widget that I really like. This wasn't hard, and it fits in nicely on the page. You now will see when I'm freezing or boiling.
  11. I customized all the little icons and graphics and linking between the pages
  12. I've added an AJAX in-place comment editor. This is my first foray into AJAX which is sort of like a live connection between your browser and the site. It does make the task of editing comments much easier.
  13. I've taken out the complexity of assigning categories to posts. I don't see why I should try to categorize, when all my posts have something to do with Behold.
  14. The hardest thing of all was to integrate and get the Blog and Forum logins working together. This involved figuring out how to do cookies, and it's a mess in WordPress 2.3. Version 2.5 of WordPress and 0.9 of bbPress are supposed to be better integrated, so maybe I'll be able to eliminate some of my hacks when I upgrade. By the way, the Forum is almost ready and will be up soon.
  15. And there's many more things I've done both visibly and under the hood as well.
• The blog uses my new site design. This includes these important considerations:
  1. I've set up my site navigation in a distinctive line across both the top and bottom of each page, and the current page is highlighted with white text on a blue background.
  2. I had a lot of trouble deciding how to style hyperlinks. I finally went with underlined hyperlinks that are the standard blue when not visited and purple when visited, since most people will recognize these without even thinking. But to make them distinctive, they are highlighted with a blue background when you mouse over them.
  3. I settled on a default font size. It is larger that the original design, but still is somewhat on the smaller size. Hopefully you like the look of it.
  4. For those of you who need larger fonts, I figured out how to allow the site to nicely change size properly when you use your browser's font size changer or zoom tool.
  5. I hate the way some sites look different when you print them, often only including just the some of the text and no structure. So I've ensured that mine will look the same printed as on screen.
  6. I've tried to eliminated inconsistencies in how the different browsers, mainly IE6, IE7 and Firefox, make my site look. This was not easy as I had to track down solutions to dozens of problems.
  7. I've hopefully eliminated all webpage errors as detected by Firefox.

Mon, April 7, 2008

• My Home Page reached 100,000 hits this month. Surprisingly, it is only the 10th most popular page on my site, and it took over 10 years to reach this milestone, averaging 800 hits a month. But it is definitely worthwhile noting the accomplishment.

Wed, March 5, 2008

• YouTube declared those Mummies Alive videos copyright infringement and removed them. So I've removed the links to them from the mumshows page.

Tues, February 12, 2008

• Someone put up all the Mummies Alive shows on YouTube. So I've added links to all the YouTube videos on B&B's Show Summaries and Ratings Page.

Tue, January 1, 2008

• After 11 years, I finally changed the background of most of my pages. Instead of the Aqua color that was very bright, I have toned it all down to the light blue color that I had been using on my Behold pages. Since the Behold pages will be changing, I wanted to keep that color around, and I thought I'd make my site, and especially my links page, a little less garish.
• The horizonal bar separator has been changed from a horizonal rainbow gradient to a vertical light blue gradient.
• I left some of the pages in their original forms: the Mummies pages (aqua with rainbow bars), the SOMA pages (yellow with orange bars), Cheryl's pages (orange with rainbow bars) and Addams pages (black with grey custom bars).
• I changed the look of Adwords, Google Search, and favicon and other graphics to match the new style.

2007 - Highlights of my Web Site's 11th Year

• July 2007 - Brenna and Brittany said it's time to remove their pages.
• Oct 2006 - Decided to fasttrack Behold and reschedule it to progress towards 2.0 as fast as possible.
• Dec 2006 - Started work to redesign my Behold site and move it to www.beholdgenealogy.com.
• During 2007 - Continued administration of the JHCWC web site
• During 2007 - Released 7 alpha versions of Behold, wrote close to 100 entries in my Behold blog, and made good progress towards the beta release.
• Jan 1997 to Dec 2007 - Over 3.6 million hits to my website. Almost 800,000 of them were in 2007. My Genealogy software links page has been my top page every month in 2007 with over 4,000 hits a month.

Sun, December 9, 2007

• I put up my prototype of my redesigned Behold Genealogy pages at: www.beholdgenealogy.com
• The SOMA Mummies Alive search that I implemented with the superb Webinator search tool was no longer working. I doubt if my ISP, myhosting.com, will still allow me to re-register the DLL. This was something they used to do, but the last time I had to do it, it took a lot of time to coerce them. They no longer have the will to support that they used to. So webinator searches are no more.
• However, I did reimplement it as a Google custom search, just like my GEDCOM search. It is a poor substitute, since it only gives at most 20 results with few options, but at least its something.
• Unfortunately, the search bar for people with the SOMA snippet on their pages will now not work. They will have to update the snippet with the one now on the SMA Join page.

Thu, November 15, 2007

• Added a new point: "Read Broken Data" onto Behold's Home Page.
• Changed the USB Drive picture on Behold's Home Page to a pic of my own Behold custom USB pen.
• The Snap Shot previews I have on my four Links pages now have forced Google ads. I'll stick with them for the time being, and see how they work out.

Sat, October 27, 2007

• Updated My Family Research page with new information on Josub Focsaner and his brothers.

Wed, October 24, 2007

• Behold's schedule has had a major revision. I'll be working harder towards moving right through to Version 2, hopefully to be done by December 2008. Then Behold will be a complete program. To do so, I had to defer a lot of non-essential features until after Version 2 is done. Behold's Home Page, FAQ Page and Future Plans Page are all revised to include the future schedule and the more direct path to completion.

Mon, October 15, 2007

• For years I've only put the date as the title of each of my Behold Blog entries. A bit boring, wouldn't you say? The date doesn't do much to help figure out what the post is about. So from now on I'm putting up something better to identify each Blog post.

Sun, September 23, 2007

• Merged all Mobile Handheld Devices into one new section in my Genealogy Software Links page. Previously, I had two sections, for Windows CE and for the Palm Operating System.

Wed, August 22, 2007

• On my Genealogy Software Links page, I added Family Historian to join RootsMagic and Reunion as one of the 3 Best Liked and Top Rated Programs. They replace Family Tree Legends, who have not done much in the last few years and are merging with MyHeritage.com.

Fri, July 27, 2007

• Brenna and Brittany said its time to remove their pages. So I've replaced them with a bit of an archive of them now at brenbrit.shtml.

Thurs, July 26, 2007

• I've removed the "Behold features" from the Behold Features page in preparation of changing it to the starting page for Behold's online help.

Tues, July 17, 2007

• The first ever independent review of Behold was published at Jacksbox4you Genealogy Blog.
• Added a "What Do Others Say About Behold" section near the bottom of Behold's home page.

Sun, July 15, 2007

• My cousin Elana's TV Series Edgemont has been over for about a year, so I've removed the link on my Home Page to her and the show.

Sun, May 13, 2007

• Finally found the webpage preview I wanted for my link pages. It uses a free service at snap.com called Snap Shots. I've added these to my four link pages: Genealogy Software, Jewish Genealogy, Jewish Winnipeg and Computer Chess. So far I like it, and I'll see how it works out.

Thu, April 19, 2007

• I released version 0.98.9 alpha of Behold.

Mon, March 16, 2007

• Changed the Amazon Book links on my Computer Chess Links page to Google AdSense and moved the Amazon links to my Computer Chess Books page. Added an affiliate ad to Bookup on my Chess Links and Brute Force pages.

Mon, March 12, 2007

• Changed section 1 of my Chess and Computer Chess Links Page from "The Local Scene" to "Challenges to the Chess and Computer Chess Community", highlighting the program Bookup.
• Added a News Flash box in the Unfinished Work and Challenges to Chess Programmers section of my Brute Force page to mention Bookup. It also uses a nice script to get the title text to blink.

Tue, March 6, 2007

• A new testimonial on my Behold Home Page. This one is from Stephen McCarthy and is under point 2: "Include Everyone".

Thu, February 22, 2007

• I was able to change my Google Custom GEDCOM search so that it now has a page of its own on my site. The results of the search now also get posted right into that page, which is rather cool.

Sun, February 18, 2007

• Added two new FAQs: "Will any upcoming version have the ability to open a text document and save it as a GEDCOM?" and "How is it then that there are genealogy web browsers that can convert HTML on the web to GEDCOM?" to my Behold FAQ page.

Sun, February 11, 2007

• Added a "Why Behold?" section to my Behold Concepts page.

Fri, February 2, 2007

• Updated the top Header of my Behold Home page so it is better aligned and looks better in Netscape with the Verdana font used in the internal tables. Changed the title from "Behold Home Page" to "Behold Genealogy Home Page".

Wed, January 31, 2007

• Added point number 3: "See All Your Notes", on my Behold Home page.

Tues, January 23, 2007

• Google has made statistics available for me for the GEDCOM search I added on my Genealogy Software Links page. I'm surprised that it is averaging over 8 queries a day. I didn't think it would be getting that many.

2006 - Highlights of my Web Site's Tenth Year

• Jan to Dec 2006 - Work continued on Behold. Version 0.98.7a alpha was released in November.
• Jan to Dec 2006 - Continued administration of the JHCWC web site
• Jan 1997 to Dec 2006 - Almost 3,000,000 hits to my site in the 10 years.

Fri, November 24, 2006

• I put a nice post up on my Behold Blog for my 50th Birthday.

Thu, November 23, 2006

• I updated the Behold Screenshot webpage with a nice new set of images and descriptions.

Wed, November 22, 2006

• A Microsoft Windows Update must have stopped Java pop-ups from working properly in Internet Explorer. Couldn't find anything else that would work without glitches. So I had to change my Why You Might Want To Purchase Behold Right Now and Behold 30-day Guarantee pop-ups into html pages.

Tues, October 24, 2006

• Google had just added a customized search tool you can build called Google Co-op. Just for fun, I used that to build a Google GEDCOM search. For now, I've added that to my Genealogy Software Links page and I'll see what the reaction is. But it seems to also have a permanent home hosted by Google.

Fri, October 20, 2006

• Added header information about my Behold blogs to the pages with the RSS icons so that Internet Explorer 7 could auto-detect them and its little RSS Feed buttons would light up.
• Removed the Affiliates page from my Behold pages. I decided that I'll be selecting my affiliates myself.

Thurs, October 19, 2006

• What the heck. I decided to try putting my Alexa link back up on my home page. Hopefully they'll have fixed the problems they were having back in August.

Sun, October 15, 2006

• Added a Pending symbol: onto my Behold Future Plans page to indicate items that are delaying awaiting some solution.

Wed, October 11, 2006

• With the upcoming IE 7.0 accepting RSS feeds, I've updated my RSS buttons from to the more obvious .
• Added on My Behold Blog page, a really neat Blog Juice button with a link to show my Blog Juice:
  

Tues, September 26, 2006

• Major changes to my Behold FAQ. Updated how much Behold will cost and System Requirements, and added a "What About Windows 98" question.

Thurs, September 7, 2006

• Wow! This was a new one. My SOMA Petition was being spammed by IP Address 69.46.6.133 for the last few days. The petition has been filled out several hundred times with links to bad sites. I've now blocked that.

Tues, September 5, 2006

• the Behold Concepts page has been expanded now to 23 points.

Fri, September 1, 2006

• Added many new points to the Behold Concepts page.

Wed, August 30, 2006

• Added a new point 10, Modeless and Standard User Interface, to my Behold Home Page.
• Redid the final section of the Behold page, enhancing the Download information and adding some Buy Now information.

Mon, August 28, 2006

• Added points 10 and 11 to introduce "Virtual Merging" to my Behold Home Page.
• Added "benefits" after the "problem" and "solution" of each Behold point.

Thurs, August 24, 2006

• Removed the Alexa Site Stats Button onto my Home Page. Their server is down too often and when it is, it very much slows my home page from loading, so bye-bye. It ended up showing a rank of 188,129 for my site.

Sat, August 12, 2006

• Fixed a redirect bug in the index.htm and index.html pages that did not seem to work properly on some browsers on a Mac. When accessing www.lkessler.com, it would redirect to http://index.shtml which is an invalid page.

Sat, July 17, 2006

• Added a very important point, number 2, to my Behold Home Page: Include Everyone.

Sat, July 15, 2006

• My site was selected by Seven Wonders, one of the Web's longest running Web Award sites, as the "Anything Goes Site of the Weekend for July 14-16, 2006"
  

Sat, Apr 22, 2006

• I removed the section 15 "Computer Genealogy Books" from my Genealogy Program Links. I decided it wasn't worthwhile maintaining. There are now no more links to Amazon on my gplinks page.

Wed, Apr 5, 2006

• Nope. That didn't work that well and was too large and ugly at the start of my Genealogy Software Links page. Instead I added a new section 15 into that page: "Computer Genealogy Books" and give little IFrames for each book.

Sat, Apr 1, 2006

• Started a little test on my Genealogy Software Links page with my Amazon links. Up to now, I've included a graphic that leads to a search for "computer genealogy" at Amazon. But over the last six months, noone has ordered from them. I'm thinking maybe Amazon changed the way the clicks are registered. So I want to try a few different things. This week, I'm including 3 direct links to 3 books using my own Amazon Web Services code that gives the picture and full detail about each book. We'll leave that up for a week and see what that does.

Mon, Mar 20, 2006

• Changed the graphic links for Amazon book pictures. The old links caused a warning icon on the status line of IE 6 that can show a privacy report listing 3rd party cookies. The new graphics don't have these cookies. Now I'm looking at whether I can do this for the Alexa stats button on my home page as well.

Thu, Mar 16, 2006

• Updated the entire style of the Jewish Heritage Centre website to reflect the new logo and theme.

Fri, Jan 20, 2006

• Updated the Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index. There are now 567 pages indexed (some non-mummies pages were removed so its down from 634 a year ago) on 63 sites (same as a year ago).

2005 - Highlights of my Web Site's Ninth Year

• Mar 2005 - The first public release of Behold was made available: Version 0.91 alpha, 20 Mar 2005.
• Mar 2005 - Restarted the Behold Blog to begin with the alpha testing.
• Apr to Dec 2004 - Continued work on Behold getting up to release 0.98 alpha in December.
• Feb to Oct 2005 - Brittany's page was just 12 hits short of 100,000 as a Gilmore Girls picture from the page was indexed on the first page of Google Images and it was getting over 300 hits a day.
• Dec 2004 - I registered the Domain name: beholdgenealogy.com for future use.
• Dec 2004 - New estimated date for the planned Beta release of Behold (January 2006) and the full release of Version 1.0 of Behold (April 2006)
• Jan to Dec 2005 - Continued administration of the JHCWC web site
• Jan to Dec 2005 - Over 484,000 more hits to my website this year.

Sat, Dec 24, 2005

• I registered the Domain name: beholdgenealogy.com for future use. Like behold.ca, it has been set up for the time being to point to my Behold pages.

Tues, Dec 20, 2005

• Changed the Behold Affiliates Page and turned it into a friendlier "Link to Behold" page.
• Added "Link to" on all the Behold links at the top and bottom of each Behold Page.

Mon, Dec 19, 2005

• Found out that when searching for "Behold" on various search engines, my Behold home page currently ranks 4th out of 13,800,000 results on Google, 2nd on Yahoo, 1st on Alltheweb and also 1st on MSN ahead of millions of other sites.

Sun, Dec 11, 2005

• Added a section on Different Languages into the Behold FAQ.

Sat, Dec 10, 2005

• Restructured my Genealogy Software Links Page by setting up the first three sections as: 1. The 3 Best Liked and Top Rated Programs (RootsMagic, Family Tree Legends and Reunion), 2. The 5 Most Popular Genealogy Programs (Family Tree Maker, PAF, Legacy, Brother's Keeper and GenoPro), and 3. The 4 Most Comprehensive Genealogy Programs (The Master Genealogist, Genbox and GEDitCOM).
• Also I began the addition of affiliate links.

Wed, Dec 7, 2005

• Version 0.98 of Behold was released.
• Behold's Version History page was restructured to group the items done by type.

Sat, Nov 26, 2005

• Added a "Behold Affiliates page", with information about how people can support Behold and make a percentage if people buy the program as a result of their referral.

Wed, Nov 16, 2005

• Added a new section: "9. Multiple Languages" on Behold's Home Page to introduce the concepts of and implementation of Unicode into Behold.

Mon, Nov 14, 2005

• Added Google Analytics tracking to my pages. I'll have to wait awhile to see what it tells me and if it is useful.

Sun, Oct 30, 2005

• Create a "Might Buy" page that opens upon selection of the "Maybe You Should Too" prompt on the Behold main page.

Sat, Oct 29, 2005

• Added a 4th testimonial to my Behold Home Page, reformatted the way the testimonials look, and added some new content and description.

Tues, Oct 25, 2005

• Updated my Behold pages to reflect the release of Version 0.97.9 alpha.

Mon, Oct 10, 2005

• Sometime in the last few weeks, Brittany's picture no longer appeared on the first page of Google's image search for Gilmore Girls. Brittany's hits have been dropping from almost 400 a day to a more normal figure as the picture slowly gets removed from Googles in the various countries. It was a good run from February through September as Brittany's page got about 90,000 hits during that time.
• Meanwhile, My Genealogy Software Links page moved up to 6th on Google when you search "Genealogy Software" and it is now up to about 150 hits a day.

Tues, Sept 27, 2005

• Updated the Behold Buy Now page to be the first page of the Buy Now process rather than an entry page to the first page.

Sun, Sept 25, 2005

• Received an e-mail from Carey Bloodworth who was tracing down the source code from all the class computer chess programs from the '80s and earlier. Too bad I never kept the source from Brute Force, or I would have made it available for him. In any case I added his site http://classicchess.tripod.com/ to the head of my Chess Programmers of the 70's and early 80's section in my Chess and Computer Chess Links page, and I also made many other updates to that page at the same time.

Mon, Sept 12, 2005

• Version 0.97 alpha of Behold was released.

Sun, May 15, 2005

• Updated my Behold survey page to change it to a Feedback page, which is more appropriate now that Behold is available in alpha version.

Wed, May 11, 2005

• Moved my book recommendations up to near the top of my home page. Included Hitchhiker's Guide and its Movie Guide, as well as Godel, Escher, Bach.

Sun, April 17, 2005

• Version 0.92 alpha of Behold was released. The Behold pages were all updated to reflect various aspects of the changes, and Web update now will work from the program, which will interact with the Setup program stored at this website.

Thurs, March 24, 2005

• Placed an Alexa Site Stats Button onto my Home Page. It starts off at rank 733,925 among the billions of websites. Also rated and reviewed my own site at Alexa so that it can start off with a 5-star review.

Tues, March 22, 2005

• Restarted the Behold Blog to begin with the alpha testing.
• Archived but kept available the previous Behold Blog entries from November 7, 2002 to March 20, 2005.

Mon, March 21, 2005

• Updated the Behold Screenshots with images from Version 0.91 alpha, 20 Mar 2005.

Sun, March 20, 2005

• The first public release of Behold was made available. Version 0.91 alpha, 20 Mar 2005. The Behold pages have been changed to indicate the release. The Download and Buy Now pages were activated.

Tue, March 1, 2005

• Brittany's Page had 10,427 hits in February, breaking my all time record for most hits by a page in a month that was 9,020 set by my Genealogy Software Links page in August 2000. This was primarily due to her Gilmore Girls picture being indexed on the first page of Google Images when you search for "Gilmore Girls".
• My site also had 41,339 hits in February, breaking the month record of 40,394 set in October 2003.

Sun, February 20, 2005

• I gave all my Behold pages a pleasant new look. They now have pale blue and pale yellow background colors with a Verdana font. Quite distinctive from all other websites on the web.

Thu, February 10, 2005

• I wasn't happy with the way my main Behold page looked. I put back in the "It is time to use a Genealogy Program that will help you!" section that I had taken out on Nov 11, 2002, and updated it to reflect other features added.
• Moved the features list out of the Behold Home Page to its own Behold Features page.

Sun, February 6, 2005

• Rewrote many of the Behold pages to reflect the upcoming release of the Alpha Version of Behold.
• Simplified the header sections of most of the Behold Pages.
• Moved the short quotes that used to be in the header of each Behold Page into a single randomized quote on the Behold Home Page.
• Added a Download, Version History, Future Plans, and a Buy Now page to the Behold Pages. The Download and Buy Now pages are not yet functional.

Thu, February 4, 2005

• Brittany's page has been getting more than 250 hits a day for the last few days. It seems her Gilmore Girls picture got onto page 1 of the Google Images search page for the text "Gilmore Girls".

Sun, January 30, 2005

• My Genealogical Software Links page passed 200,000 hits today.
• Added Gilmore Girls to Brenna's page.

Mon, January 3, 2005

• Did a major overhaul to my Computer Chess Books page. It now links each book to Amazon and has more information and pictures of some of the books.

Sun, January 2, 2005

• Removed Brenna and Brittany's TV Shows page and Movies page. We used to update them once a year, but the girls are just watching too many tv shows and movies to keep it up. It was fun while it lasted. Those two pages now redirect to Brenna and Brittany's pages.

Sat, January 1, 2005

• Brittany added Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events onto her page.
• Dollz was removed from Brenna's page.
• Amazon links were added for each item on Brenna and Brittany's pages, and their recommended items were removed.

2004 - Highlights of my Web Site's Eighth Year

• July 2004 - Developed an RSS feed for my Behold Blog.
• Sept 2004 - My Genealogy Software Links page now is high up on all the major search engines for relevant searches.
• Dec 2004 - Added associate book links to Amazon.com, .ca, and .co.uk from many of my pages. They only prompted 4 sales so far. We'll see how they go.
• Dec 2004 - Developed my second RSS feed , for my Behold Discussion Forum.
• Dec 2004 - Set firm dates for the planned Beta release of Behold (July 2005) and the full release of Version 1.0 of Behold (December 2005)
• Jan to Dec 2004 - Continued administration of the JHCWC web site
• Jan to Dec 2004 - Over 305,000 more hits to my website this year.

Tue, December 21, 2004

• It's been just over a year since the last update to the Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index. We now have 634 pages indexed (down from 825 last year) on 63 sites (down from 65 sites last year).
• Also updated all the links on the SOMA links page
• As well, I revalidated the Mummies Alive Webring sites, and eliminated 3 sites no longer existing bringing the total down to 9 sites.

Mon, December 20, 2004

• Changed my book suggestions and links to Amazon on: Genealogy Software Links, Computer Chess Links and Jewish Genealogy to be links to searches on the Amazon.com pages. This makes these links less obtrusive and more relevant to the page by giving a very comprehensive set of results.
• Added a small script so that the current year is displayed in my copyright at the bottom of each page. Now I don't have to update all those pages every year. Yay!
• Added category-based links to Amazon from my New Addams Family pages.

Sun, December 19, 2004

• Opened up a new Behold Discussion Forum for Behold Blog Comments. This forum is linked from a large "Comments" image on my Behold Blog and will give readers the opportunity to comment on my ramblings.
• Developed my second RSS feed , this time for my Behold Discussion Forum.

Mon, December 13, 2004

• Set firm dates for the planned Beta release of Behold (July 2005) and the full release of Version 1.0 of Behold (December 2005)

Sun, December 5, 2004

• Added relevant book suggestions and links to Amazon on these pages: Computer Chess Links, Jewish Genealogy, My Home Page, and Mummies Toys page. Brenna and Brittany each gave me a book, video and album to add on their pages.

Sat, December 4, 2004

• Set up an Associate membership at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca and Amazon.co.uk and I have links of my recommended genealogy software books now added to my Genealogical Software Links page.

Thu, December 2, 2004

• Added the Happy Chanukah message on my home page with a link to Jew-Heyya. As long as that link is there, this will become a seasonal thing that I will put up around Chanukah time each year.

Mon, November 22, 2004

• Added a grant of permission to my gplinks, jglinks, jwlinks or cclinks pages, to allow reprinting or reposting of the info as long as full credit is given.

Sun, October 3, 2004

• I spent a few months trying to do an extreme makeover on my Behold Forum, but in the end I went back to what I had and refined that. Still the changes here were significant enough to enhance useability of the Forum. I've still got a few tweaks to go that will be slowly added.

Mon, September 6, 2004

• I'm amazed that my Genealogy Software Links page now turns up first on all the major search engines (google, alltheweb, teoma, hotbot, msn and yahoo) when you search for "genealogy program". If you change it to "genealogy programs", it comes in at 1st, 2nd or 3rd. Searching for "genealogy software" and it ranges from 11th to 27th place.

Mon, August 23, 2004

• My Genealogy Software Links page was highlighted in Issue 29 of PC How To Family Tree magazine in the article on Genealogy utilites on page 79.

Sun, August 1, 2004

• Updated Brittany's Page. Out with Card Captors, Dragonball Z, and Abby Hayes. In with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Sun, July 18, 2004

• Developed an RSS feed for my Behold Blog. Now you can use any News Aggregator program to read the new entries added to the Blog.

Sat, July 17, 2004

• Set the default on My Behold Blog to NOT color morph. It just slows down the page display too much. But its too neat a feature to eliminate completely.

Sun, July 11, 2004

• Changed the Behold page default icon to match the cute one used in my program. (Has the Behold sun in the top left and the standard "home" house in the bottom right.

Sat, May 30, 2004

• Found out that there are dozens of Open Source Genealogy programs at SourceForge. I reworked my Genealogy Software Links page to incorporate the most popular of them and to include a standard format for Open Source projects, showing both the Home page and the Development page at SourceForge.

2003 - Highlights of my Web Site's Seventh Year

• Feb 2003 - My CBC Radio Commentary was added to my home page
• Mar 2003 - Implemented my Behold Discussion Forum.
• Jan to Dec 2003 - Only got 3.6% of version 0.99 of Behold finished this year. 16.4% to go.
• Jan to Dec 2003 - Continued administration of the JHCWC web site
• Dec 2003 - Over 290,000 more hits to my website this year.

Wed, December 31, 2003

• Checking the status of my Genealogy Software Links page on Google:
  Search for "genealogy program" and it is in 2nd place out of 878,000 results.
  Search for "genealogy programs" and it is in 1st place out of 576,000 results.
  Search for "genealogy software" and it is in 15th place out of 1,760,000 results.

Wed, December 10, 2003

• Another update to the Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index. Found out again that because of a server change, the search tools was not working for a few months. I got that fixed again, but this time the improvement in the Server has made the search tool lightning-fast which is super! Although we lost a few major sites since April 2002, there are still 825 pages indexed on 65 sites.

Sat, December 6, 2003

• Major changes and updates to the SOMA Home Page, the SOMA Links page, and the Mummies Alive Toys page (the latter to incorporate info about the new DVD).

Fri, September 19, 2003

• Major overhaul to my Behold FAQ. The number one question is "When will Behold be ready?".

Fri, August 29, 2003

• The annual update by Brenna and Brittany of their pages was done. Brenna changed her Harry Potter picture and removed T*Witches replacing it with Spongebob Squarepants. Brittany added another Neopet, and replaced her Soup Faerie Helpers Guild with Dragonball Z.
• Brenna and Brittany updated their Top TV Picks and Top Movie Picks pages.

Sat, May 31, 2003

• Some of the games on my Brute Force Games page didn't track the games properly. I found the problem and repaired it.

Fri, May 30, 2003

• I added 19 new entries of German Genealogy programs to my Genealogy Program/Software Links page. I also split up my "Other Genealogy Programs" section into "English sites" and "Non-English sites".

Sun, May 18, 2003

• My gplinks page moved up only to about 86th place (on page 9) from 101st with that last change on April 2. Thought I'd try again. This time, I'm changing the title to "Genealogy Software Links", and we'll see where that leads it.

Wed, April 2, 2003

• In Feb 2002, on my Genealogical Program Links page, I changed my wording from "Genealogical" to "Genealogy". This has successfully moved it up into 3rd place when you now search "Genealogy Program" using Google. But "Genealogy Program" gives 468,000 results, whereas "Genealogy Software" gives 638,000 results. My page show up in 101st place (on page 11) when you search for "Genealogy Software". Today I made a change to the subtitle of my page to include the GS words. We'll see over time if that improves the position of the page on Google.

Wed, March 19, 2003

• Implemented my Behold Discussion Forum.

Sun, February 16, 2003

• Removed Family Origins (no longer being supported) and replaced it with RootsMagic in my selection of Best Genealogy Programs on my Genealogical Program Links page. I also changed the wording of the section "Other Really Good Genealogy Programs" to "Other Full Featured Genealogy Programs". It's always bothered me that some of the programs I never really thought were "very good", but they are all capable in their own ways at least.

Wed, February 12, 2003

• I recorded a Commentary for CBC Radio on Computer Chess and Intelligence. Put info and a link to it on my home page and on my Chess and Computer Chess Links page.

Fri, February 7, 2003

• Well the flag and GeoPhrase didn't last long. It is sort of neat but it didn't really add anything and got in the way, so I removed it from my home page. I like the concept, though, and maybe I can use something like it someday in Behold.

Sun, February 2, 2003

• Thought I'd try added a Canadian flag and a GeoPhrase: "Special welcome to my visitors from ___" with a flag of their country to my Home Page. This is a very interesting free service that caught my attention at another website.

2002 - Highlights of my Web Site's Sixth Year

• Jan 2002 - I secured the domain name: www.behold.ca for my Behold pages.
• Nov 2002 - Began my Behold Blog.
• Jan to Dec 2002 - Continued administration of the JHCWC web site
• Dec 2002 - Over 250,000 more hits to my website this year.

Sun, December 22, 2002

• Updated info about the FOCSANER family on My Family Research page. Working via e-mail with newly connected cousins, we have now gone back one more generation and of course have new mysteries.

Mon, November 11, 2002

• Created my Behold Blog, a weblog documenting the program development process for Behold. I customized the page design from a beautiful template made by Eric Costello. Read my blog for more info on this.
• Completely revised my Behold Pages. Of significance, the concepts were moved from the main page to a new Concepts page. A features and progress list replaces the concepts that were on the main page. Many other changes and links were updated on all the Behold pages.
• My Genealogical Activities page was completed revised and a lot more history was included.

Thu, November 6, 2002

• Moved Behold from the Full Featured Programs to the Utility Programs section of my Genealogy Program Links page. That's where it should have been all the time. Once I do get Version 2 of Behold out, then I can move it back.

Thu, October 24, 2002

• Took off the "Vote for this site" graphic from my Genealogy Program Links. The voting ended early as some of the sites were ballot stuffing. Even so, it was interesting, and in only 17 days, my site got 79 votes which was good enough for 13th place. See http://www.genealogicaljourneys.com/topsites/topsites.html for the final standings.

Mon, October 7, 2002

• Just for fun, I put a "Vote for this site" graphic on my Genealogy Program Links page that links to www.genealogicaljourneys.com. We'll have to see how many votes it can generate.

Tues, September 10, 2002

• The MA search tool is now working again.

Sun, September 8, 2002

• The Mummies Alive search tool has not been working for a couple of months since my site hoster changed the server. I'm still working with them to get this fixed.
• Updated SOMA home page to reflect new MA groups now available.
• Removed Mummies Alive Video info box from B&B's Mummies Alive home page.

Sat, August 31, 2002

• Many changes to my Computer Chess Links. Many of the Kasparov vs Deep Blue sites no longer exist, but the new Man-Machine competitions coming this Fall now have sites.

Sat, August 24, 2002

• Cory's band Colourblind has disbanded and their website has been "finalized", so I've removed the info about it from my Home page.
• While at it, I took off the 2000-2001 Golden Web Award from my Home page..

Tue, August 6, 2002

• At about 115,000 hits, My Genealogy Program Links page surpassed our Mummies Alive Home Page to become our number 1 most requested page.

Sun, June 30, 2002

• Brenna and Brittany updated their pages. For Brenna, Sugar Jones, Christina Aguilara and Beanie Babies are out and Harry Potter, Neopets, Dollz and T*Witches are in. For Brittany, Power Puff Girls, Dragon Ball Z and Digimon are out, and Harry Potter, the Soup Faerie guild, and Abby Hayes are in.

Fri, April 12, 2002

• Unfortunately, March and April were very busy for me. Work on Behold came to a near standstill and my "coming in Early 2002" now is not realistic. I changed this to "Coming ASAP (I'm working on it!)".

Sat, Mar 9, 2002

• Updated the Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index. Interest is waning a bit in Mummies Alive. 866 pages on 70 sites are indexed. That is down from the 1212 pages indexed last April.

Fri, February 15, 2002

• Found 5 original game annotations for my Brute Force games and I added them into my Brute Force Games page.
• On my Brute Force page, added a nice graphic to allow the user easy access to the Palview viewer for the game.

Wed, February 13, 2002

• I found a marvelous online Chess game viewer, courtesy of Palview. It is really slick. I updated my Brute Force Games page to include it.
• Also, appropriately modified my Brute Force page to make reference to the games on the Games page.

Sat, February 2, 2002

• For years, my Genealogical Program Links has been getting a lot of attention. It is currently getting almost 100 hits a day. But ... I just realized it does NOT show up on the major search engines when you search for "Genealogy Programs". So I renamed it to Genealogy Program Links and changed the initial description of the page somewhat. What an oversight on my part! Let's see how popular it gets now.

Thu, January 24, 2002

• I secured the domain name: www.behold.ca for my Behold pages.

Tue, January 15, 2002

• Finished the move of the Jewish Heritage Centre's site from www.jhcwc.org to its new site: www.jhcwc.org
• Placed stub redirecting pages up on the old JHC site.

Tue, January 1, 2002

• Took out the "2 month" announcement from my Behold page (after 3 1/2 months) and instead say it is "Coming Early in 2002". Not much longer now!
• Removed the Mindit link from my Behold page and replaced it with an "e-mail me" to be notified when Behold is ready.
• Changed all my e-mail links on all my pages to be Spam-proof.

2001 - Highlights of my Web Site's Fifth Year

• Jan to Dec 2001 - Continued administration of the JHCWC web site
• April 2000 - Bye Bye Concentric. My original website disappeared for good.
• June to Dec 2001 - Updated my Behold pages and really started working hard on the program.
• Aug 31, 2001 - B&B's Mummies Alive Home page exceeded 100,000 hits
• Sept/Oct 2001 - Supported WTC initiatives on my website
• Dec 15, 2001 at 16:42:15 EST - My website had it's 1,000,000th hit!

Sat, December 15, 2001 at 16:42:15 EST

• My website had it's 1,000,000th hit! The lucky page was What's New.

Mon, November 5, 2001

• Brittany's page: Cardcaptors are in, replacing Pokemon.

Thurs, October 25, 2001

• The World Trade Center site has now defined its purpose as a memorial to those who were killed. I've done my part to help, and have now removed the link from my home page.

Thurs Oct 18, 2001

• Implemented a MindIt button on my main Behold webpage so that users can now press the button to use the MindIt service to get free e-mail notices when my page updates.

Sun Oct 14, 2001

• WebRings lost a lot of functionality when Yahoo took them over in Nov 2000. But it appears that they now have new (or maybe even former) ownership again. They are just about back to the way they used to be and the customized instructions about how to get around the horrible Yahoo webring navigation bar are no longer needed on the Mummies Alive WebRing page I had to create. So after customizing the Mummies Alive logo at the new MA WebRing Hub Page, I changed my own MA WebRing page to now just be a redirecting link to the Hub.
• Also, with regards to WebRings, I readded my Reunion Webpage with an explanation that I took my info down, but this will keep the WebRing linked.

Fri, October 5, 2001

• Coffeecup.com removed the redirection of their Sept 11 support banner and their link now only goes to their own site (which is not a nice thing to do). I've removed their banner, and added a ribbon that goes directly to the worldtradecenter domain instead.

Tues, September 25, 2001

• I've decided to call the first release of Behold Version 1.0 instead of Version 0.90. I updated my Behold pages and made some major changed to the Behold Frequently Asked Questions.

Sun, September 23, 2001

• Updated my Behold pages - now announcing just 2 months to go! The first "month" actually took just over three (since June 16th), but I have got 1/3 to the final release goal. I'll work hard to see how well the "second" month goes.
• On the Behold pages, I changed the Behold moniker from: "Behold - the Genealogist's Program and Research Tool" to "Behold - A New Concept for Genealogy - A New Era for Genealogists".
• Fixed throughout my site all my incorrect spellings of Gedcom to GEDCOM.
• Removed My Desired Features in a Genealogical Program page (created June 10 1997) from my site. With the upcoming release of Behold, the contents of the page are now just too outdated.

Wed, September 19, 2001

• I was one of 40,000 to post coffeecup's WTC support banner on my site. In less than a week, we sites raised over $1,000,000 for the cause.

Thurs, September 13, 2001

• The horrendous events of Sept 11, 2001 have deeply troubled me. I pray that the war against World terrorism shall one day be won and that people everywhere treat others as they would want to be treated. I added a banner on my Home Page, care of www.coffeecup.com, to support the victims and promote donations to the relief effort.

  

Fri, August 31, 2001

• Posted info about the new Mummies Alive Video on B&B's Mummies Alive Toy Info and Other Merchandise Page.
• Today, B&B's Mummies Alive Home Page became the first page at my site to exceed 100,000 hits.

Mon, August 20, 2001

• I indexed almost 30 of Dick Eastman's Genealogical Program Reviews and added links to them on my Genealogical Program Links page. I will add new entries to my Links page as he does new reviews.

Sun, August 19, 2001

• Brittany added her third Neopet to her webpage.

Thu, August 9, 2001

• Updated and reorganized my Computer Chess Links page including links for the upcoming Kramnik vs Deep Fritz match.

Sun, July 22, 2001

• Updated Brenna and Brittany's Top TV Picks and Top Movie Picks pages.
• Embedded the complete Mummies Alive theme song into B&B's About MA page.

Sun, July 1, 2001

• Added a Behold Screenshot page including a view of the Main Screen and another one focusing on the Name Index.

Sat, June 16, 2001

• Updated my Behold pages pages. I'm making the bold statement that Version 0.90 will be out in 3 months (if all goes well). Let's see if I can do it.
• For whatever its worth, I've updated the Behold "favicon" to be the Behold sun logo with the "WEB" word at the bottom. But the favicon just doesn't seem to often work anymore. It worked with IE 5.0 but does not seem to with IE 5.5.

Sun, Apr 29, 2001

• On Brenna's Page: Out with Back Street Boys. In with Sugar Jones.
• Added the "Best Viewed with Any Browser" graphic at the bottom of my Home Page.

Fri, Apr 27, 2001

• Concentric removed the redirecting links that were on my old site. It was nice that they left them up for four months. Thus the strings to Concentric are severed for good. Bye Bye Concentric.

Mon, Apr 9, 2001

• News about DIC's upcoming release of a new Mummies Alive home video has been highlighted on Brenna & Brittany's Mummies Alive Page, the SOMA Home Page, and the SOMA Links Page. A link and graphic to subscribe directly to the Mummies Alive Mailing List has been added to the SOMA Home Page.

Mon, Apr 2, 2001

• Stuart Manning took off the Addams Family wav file from his site. I had said at the time that he could use it and I did not want to duplicate it on the web, but now that he has taken it down, I have added it to B&B's Addams Family Home Page. It starts up automatically when the page is loaded.
• The Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index is updated. 1212 pages are indexed, down from the 1363 pages in January, but now the problem of duplicate indexed pages has been fixed.

Sat, Feb 17, 2001

• Brittany discovered an amazing site called Neopets. I can't believe they've got over 7,000,000 kids registered! A fantastic fantasy world, and Brittany placed her two Neopets onto her page.

Thu, Feb 1, 2001

• Removed the separate statistics for my lkessler.com and Concentric sites on my Summary Page. Now only the combined total is shown.

Wed, Jan 17, 2001

• Updated the Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index. 1363 pages are now indexed - up from the 1169 in July. But I did notice a few sites got indexed twice (because of a capital/small letter problem) which made up about 60 of the increase. Even so, it is amazing that the Mummies Alive universe on the web is still growing.
• The Java search routine added in Dec 1999 on the JHCWC Search page was removed. There were too many user complaints that it wouldn't work for them.

Fri, Jan 12, 2001

• My old e-mail address: lkessler@concentric.net was deactivated. But the old website at http://www.concentric.net/~lkessler still exists for now with its links still redirecting to www.lkessler.com. I believe Concentric may leave them up for another six months.

Wed, Jan 10, 2001

• Restructured the JHCWC pages to include a unique navigation and feature column on the right side of each page..

Wed, Jan 3, 2001

• Added info about my cousin Elana Nep and her part in the TV Series Edgemont to my Home Page.

2000 - Highlights of my Web Site's Fourth Year

• February 2000 - Finished B&B's Addams Family Pages
• May 2000 - Introduced my Behold Sun Logo
• May 2000 - Moved all my pages from Concentric to their new home at www.lkessler.com
• July 2000 - Took over administration of the Mummies Alive webring
• All Year - Continued administration of the JHCWC web site
• December 2000 - Another year, another quarter million hits.
• Looking forward to my 1,000,000th hit sometime in 2001.

Fri, Dec 22, 2000

• Included a set of pages for the Shanghai Connection Exhibition on the JHCWC pages..

Thu, Nov 30, 2000

• Added the Behold Sun Logo as a Favorite Icon for the Behold pages.

Tues, Nov 14, 2000

• This time, we found an animated cursor that works (using Javascript). We put up the Power Puff girl Bubbles on Brittany's page. It changes when you go over a link or click the mouse. Thanks go to http://www2f.biglobe.ne.jp/~takan/javac/ for creating the "Love Mouse" and making it available.
• While at it, I did the same for the B&B's Addams Family Pages using my favorite Batmoon cursor from CometZone and a Brew pot for when the mouse is clicked. Did not implement a different image for links there though.

Sat, Nov 11, 2000

• Well, Yahoo has decided that the old Webring snippets will continue to work forever. Therefore I reinstituted my Mummies Alive Webring page and put instructions on how to join and use our nice looking banners instead of the ugly default webring one. A bit of trickery is involved to get them to work for newly added sites. What a pain!

Fri, Oct 6, 2000

• Unfortunately, I found out that the CometZone cursors I added on Aug 29th require users to download a java program from CometZone. This is not acceptable to me, so I removed the cursors.

Sun, Sept 17, 2000

• More new info about the Mummies Alive Toys including updates about the 2nd set with pictures, a pair of Mummies Alive slippers, and info about the 2nd comic book.

Fri, Sept 15, 2000

• Webring.org was taken over by Yahoo. As a result, the Mummies Alive Webring changed locations and a bunch of procedures for it had to be modified. The Webring page I had created back on July 12 no longer works and is no longer needed. I replaced it with a redirection to the new Mummies Alive Webring page that is on Yahoo.

Sun, Sept 3, 2000

• Added Favorite Icons to my web pages. These show up as the icon for the web page when it is saved by someone as a favorite, but only works for Internet Explorer 5.0 or later (sometimes). I set up most of my pages with an LK/lkessler.com icon, Brenna and Brittany have their own (with the Addams pages being black-based), Cheryl has her own, and SOMA has its own.
• Just for fun, now added the cursor Brenna wanted for her page (Christina Aguilera) and the cursor Brittany wanted for her page (the pokemon Eevee). They'll probably change them from time-to-time.

Thu, Aug 31, 2000

• My Genealogical Program Links Page had 9020 hits during August. This smashed the record of 3739 held since March 1998 by B&B's Mummies Alive Home Page. Most of the credit is due to GP Links having a prominent link on www.familytree.com for about 12 days in August. During that time, it was receiving about 600 hits a day from the familytree link.

Tues, Aug 29, 2000

• Added a cute bat-moon-cursor to B&B's Addams pages and a cool sunglasses cursor to my Behold pages made possible by CometZone (Removed on Oct 6, 2000 - see above).

Thurs, Aug 24, 2000

• Cheryl's page always looked better in Netscape because the "GET OFF" text only blinked in Netscape. Something I've always wanted to do was to replace the blinking text with an animated gif. Finally I did it, and it now blinks in Internet Explorer as well! Take heed of Cheryl's warning everyone!

Sat, Aug 20, 2000

• My site received the 2000-2001 Golden Web Award.

Sun, Aug 6, 2000

• Lots of new info about the Mummies Alive Toys. Many of them are now appearing on eBay, and I also have new information about the Official Mummies Alive Annual.

Fri, July 21 2000

• To my disappointment, in 2 months not a single person used the Zeal box to rate either our Mummies or Addams Family pages. Also, only 2 people registered to Zeal using the Zeal link on my Genealogical Program Links pages. Because of such poor response, I removed the Zeal links on those three pages.

Tues, July 18, 2000

• Updated the Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index. 1169 pages are now indexed - up from the 901 in November.

Wed, July 12, 2000

• Finally, after being down for about 12 months, I made a page (removed Sept 15 2000) for the Mummies Alive Webring. The Webring had lost its home page since Sparx Echidna had changed sites. Sparx said I should take over the web administration for her, so I did.

Fri, June 30, 2000

• The first part of the Zeal promotion is over. In only a few hours of time, I earned over $150 US for the National Genealogical Society. I also became one of Zeal's 500 original Zealots and earned an Original Zealot teashirt for my efforts.

Sat, May 27, 2000

• Started adding links to my pages on the new user-driven search tool Zeal.com. For fun, I added a Zeal rate this page banner on Brenna and Brittany's Mummies Alive Home Page and on their New Addams Family Home Page. We'll see how that goes.
• Also selected the National Genealogical Society as my chosen Zeal charity. (It had to be a U.S. charity.)

Mon, May 22, 2000

• Concentric Network is pulling out of Canada as of July 1, 2000. I have had a very nice 3 1/2 year engagement with Concentric as my ISP. During that time, my Concentric-based site of over 50 pages has received over 500,000 hits. It's been a good run ... but now ...
• Time to move ...
• Today I completed the move of all my Concentric pages over to my domain at www.lkessler.com
• All links, counters, scripts, and logfiles are now based at www.lkessler.com
• Back at the Concentric Site, all pages have been replaced with "This Page has moved to ..." pages.
• These pages will remain at Concentric until the majority of links to my pages at other web sites get changed (I'm aiming for December 2000).
• I have changed to using as my e-mail address.
• My Concentric e-mail will be rerouted to while my Concentric Site remains (Dec 2000).

Also on Mon, May 22, 2000

• Enhanced my Behold Home Page. Added a Frequently Asked Questions page. Also put a much larger notice about Behold on My Home Page.
• Introduced my Behold Sun Logo ==>

Wed, May 17, 2000

• The New Addams Family show won some awards. A new awards section has been added to the Addams Behind the Scenes Page.
• Some Funny Fester Filibusters were added to the Addams Other Neat Things page.

Sat, Apr 29, 2000

• Brenna and Brittany updated their Top TV Picks and Top Movie Picks pages.

Wed, Apr 26, 2000

• The JHCWC pages celebrate one full year on the Web. Over that time, the home page has received 9900 hits (over 25 a day) and all the pages in total have had 38800 hits. Its popularity is continuing to increase.

Sun, Apr 23, 2000

• Brittany updated her web page. Out with Hercules and Beanie Babies. In with Power Puff Girls and Digimon.

Sun, Mar 5, 2000

• Added info and pics about the Mummies Alive Colouring Book to B&B's Mummies Alive Toys and Other Merchandise Page.

Sun, Feb 27, 2000

• Finally! We finished reviews of all 65 episodes of the New Addams Family! There was a lot of work involved here and it took over 8 months to complete. Reviews of the shows also contributed heavily to the Characters and Other Neat Things pages.
• Added a picture of Nicole, Brody and Shauna to our Addams Behind the Scenes page.
• We've also tabulated another 1000 Mummies Alive surveys and updated the Survey Results page so that it reflects the 2500 surveys we have received to date.
• So now that Brenna and Brittany have finished their wonderful pages for Mummies Alive and The New Addams Family, what's next for them? Dragonball Z? Digimon? Monster Ranchers? Powerpuff Girls? We'll have to wait to see.

Sat, Feb 19, 2000

• The message on Another message from Cheryl is now "I love Peacock Chairs" and shows Morticia's, Marvin's, and Cheryl's chairs.

Tue, Jan 18, 2000

• Family Origins replaces the Ultimate Family Tree in my selection of 4 Best Genealogy Programs on my Genealogical Program Links Page.

Sat, Jan 1, 2000

• My Intro to Genealogy Page was named one of the Picks for the Month of Jan 2000 by Mish Mash.
• This also prompted me to update my Intro to Genealogy page and weed out the no-longer valid info.

1999 - Highlights of my Web Site's Third Year

• Motto for the year: "1999 - This year, I'll get everything done!"
• March 1999 - New site set up for the Jewish Heritage Centre at their own domain.
• April 1999 - Completed the redesign of the Jewish Heritage Centre site, and closed my Historical and Genealogical Society pages.
• June 1999 - Brenna and Brittany's New Addams Family Web Pages were put up.
• August & September 1999 - Exclusive interviews with Michael Roberds and Glenn Taranto.
• Won 3 Awards:
  April 1999: Armon's Beefy Burger Award
  August 1999: Keyframe Animation Website Award
  September 1999: Golden Web Award
• December 1999 - Finished the year with over 490,000 page hits.

Fri, Dec 31, 1999

• Removed the Winnipeg Family Web Ring from My Home Page. Sorry - not enough traffic.
• Removed the 1999 Golden Web Award from My Home Page.

Wed, Dec 9, 1999

• Added a wonderful Java search routine which was created by Myron Turner for the JHCWC Search page.

Mon, Nov 29, 1999

• The Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index has been updated. 901 pages are now indexed - down from the 1154 in June.

November 1999

• Serious work has begun on the development of version 1.0 of Behold. The Behold Page will announce something when it is ready.

Sun, Oct 24, 1999

• With the Kasparov-World match now ended, I updated many of the links to the tournament on my Computer Chess Links Page, and updated other links on the page as well.

Mon, Oct 11, 1999

• Brenna and Brittany have updated their web pages, as well as their TV Picks and their Movie Picks pages.
• Brenna added Christina Aguilera.
• Brittany added Dragonball Z and Pegasus.

Fri, Oct 1, 1999

• It took 14 months, but B&B's Mummies Alive Home Page finally regained top spot on My Summary Page after having relinquished that honor to the SOMA Links Page. The reason for this must be due to the Fox Network picking it up which is resulting in a renewed interest in the show.
• B&B's Addams Family Home Page moved into the list for the first time taking over 4th spot. This can be mainly attributed to the page finally getting its listing on Yahoo.

Wed, Sept 29, 1999

• Major update to the JHCWC site with material from its Fall 1999 newsletter.
• Removed the "Contents" page from the JHCWC site. The navigation around the site was simple enough that the contents page really was superfluous.

Sat, Sept 25, 1999

• Another message from Cheryl was added (with a connection at the bottom of B&B's Addam's Family Pages
• A significant bit of wording change on Cheryl's original message page, which now says "If you refuse ..." instead of "Otherwise".
• A major overhaul of the Mummies Alive Toy Info and Other Merchandise Page with new information from a variety of sources.

Sat, Sept 11, 1999

• Brenna and Brittany's New Addams Family Home Page was finally listed on Yahoo after two months of trying.
  This is now what I've got listed.

Sat, September 4, 1999

• My whole site received the Golden Web Award, which is presented to those sites whose web design and content have achieved levels of excellence deserving of recognition.

Sat, September 4, 1999

• Completed our second Addams Family Interview, this one with Glenn Taranto who played Gomez.
• Also put up another new Addams page, this one called Old Versus New, which compares the two series..

Wed, September 1, 1999

• Added a picture of Cory's band on My Home Page and updated the description for them.
• Joined the Winnipeg Family Web Ring. The link to the Ring is on My Home Page.

Thurs, August 19, 1999

• Put up a terrific interview with Michael Roberds, who plays Fester on the New Addams Family.

Sun, August 8, 1999

• Added a whole set of wonderful pictures from the show onto Brenna and Brittany's Addams Family pages. It includes a really neat animated gif of the family on the Characters Page.

Sat, August 7, 1999

• Brenna and Brittany's Mummies Alive Pages won one of the Keyframe Animation Website Awards for August 1999, as one of the best in animation-related websites.

Wed, July 28, 1999

• I added a "Last Modified" date to each of my link pages: Computer Chess, Genealogical Programs, Jewish Genealogy, and Jewish Winnipeg. This will encourage me to ensure they are kept up-to-date.
• Added new links for the Kasparov-World match on my Computer Chess Links Page.

Mon, July 26, 1999

• Generations slipped out of the top 4 and TMG moved back to the top of my Genealogical Program Links Page. A major cleanup also took place as many new links were added to the page and inactive ones were deleted.

Mon, July 5, 1999

• Its been quite a while since my last major update to my Computer Chess Links. I cleaned out the dead links and added a new section for the Kasparov vs the World match. I have lots of new links to add which I'll hopefully finish over the next few weeks.

Wed, June 30, 1999

• The Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index has been updated. 1154 pages are now indexed - down slightly from the 1203 in February.
• The Search Index List of All Pages Indexed has been fixed to be grouped properly by directory within Domain. The timeout setting has been increased to 60 seconds to reduce the occurrence of time-outs when All Pages Indexed are listed.

Fri, June 25, 1999

• A long needed update was done to the SOMA Links Page. Many dead links were dropped into a new category and a host of new links were added. I am amazed that there is still that much action in the Mummies Alive web community!

Sat, June 19, 1999

• Quite a bit added to Brenna and Brittany's New Addams Family Pages. We removed "About the Show" and replaced it with "Links".

Mon, June 7, 1999

• After extensive work, we put up the first version of Brenna and Brittany's New Addams Family Web Pages. Right off the bat we have what most of the pages of the site set up: Home, About the Show, The Characters, Show Summaries, House for Sale, Behind the Scenes, Other Neat Things, and Survey. There is still a fair bit of content to fill in, which will take some time to complete. We also hope to acquire an interview or two for the site before we are done.

Sun, May 16, 1999

• Brittany updated her page. New on her page are Pokemon, Furbies, and Pinky and the Brain. Brenna was happy with her page and no updates were needed at this time.

Sat, May 1, 1999

• Finally got the page counters working at the bottom of all the JHCWC pages. This counter is a little unique, showing the hits for the current page as well as the total hits for the entire site.

Wed, April 28, 1999

• Removed and added redirecting links for the following pages from my site:
  • The Jewish Historical Society Page and its newsletter page is now redirected to the Jewish Heritage Centre site.
  • The Genealogical Institute Page is now redirected to its page on the Heritage Centre's site.
  • JGEMS was taken down with some of its content put up on the Heritage Centre's Archives page and Search page.
• Finally, links to these removed pages on the rest of my site were corrected.
• These are the first major pages I have removed from my site. They were all up since my site became active in January 1997. In that time, the two Historical Society pages had achieved 6150 hits; the Genealogical Institute page had 3966 hits; and the five J-GEMS pages had a total of 27337 hits.

Mon, April 26, 1999

• Completed the initial version of the JHCWC (Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada) web site. The other pages completed were: Archives, Search, Services, Donations, Museum, Holocaust, Genealogy, and History.

Wed, April 21, 1999

• The graphic with my motto for the year: "1999 - This year, I'll get everything done!" was added to my home page.

Mon, April 12, 1999

• The JHCWC Membership Page was added.
• The JHCWC site was disassembled from a Microsoft Front Page Web, to a standard text-based Web with server-side includes. No visual changes were made, but this is mentioned only to make note of the significantly laborious endeavor that was required. Microsoft Front Page is a real beast that is very difficult to control, and I just finally could not take all of its idiosyncrasies anymore.

Sat, April 10, 1999

• Brenna and Brittany became the very proud recipients of "Armon's Beefy Burger Award". See their Mummies Alive Home Page.

Fri, March 12, 1999

• My Domain's Main Page has been cleaned up to prepare it as the commercial site where Behold will be located. Search Tool announcements have been removed, and the development of Alli-getter (a search tool for the masses) has been relegated to my not-as-important list of projects at the current time, as I work on Behold.

Mon, March 1, 1999

• I have put up the first web pages for the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada at the new domain: http://www.jhcwc.org
• For today's "Grand Opening", there are three pages: Home, Contents (later removed), and Logo (later renamed to About Us).

Tue, February 23, 1999

• The Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index has been updated for February. There are now 1203 Mummies Alive related pages are indexed - up from the 1106 indexed last month.
• The Search Index now checks for duplicate identical pages at different urls (usually because of an alias). Only one copy is included so that identical entries will no longer occur in the search results.

Thu, January 28, 1999

• A milestone was reached, as there are now 50 Mummies Alive web sites that have joined SOMA (The Supporters of Mummies Alive) by placing the SOMA logo on their site.

Wed, January 20, 1999

• Brenna and Brittany's TV Show Page and Movies Page have been extensively updated.

Mon, January 18, 1999

• Completed the January update for the Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index. Now 1106 Mummies Alive related pages are indexed - up from the 951 indexed last month.
• Also, the speed of the Mummies Alive List of Pages Indexed has been greatly improved. Timeouts should no longer be a problem.

Fri, January 1, 1999

• This month my Web Site is Celebrating its 2nd Birthday, with a birthday banner on my Home Page.

1998 - Highlights of my Web Site's Second Year

• February 1998 - Supporters of Mummies Alive on the Web (SOMA) site built.
• March & April 1998 - Exclusive interviews with Seth Kearsley and Robbie London.
• August 1998 - My Genealogical Program Links page was listed as one of Web Guide Monthly's Best Rated Sites of the Year.
• September 1998 - Implemented Full Text Search Engine for Mummies Alive Sites.
• October 1998 - Quietly put up lkessler.com - My Domain.
• December 1998 - Finished the year with over 270,000 page hits.

Sat, December 19, 1998

• New information about Mummies Alive merchandise was added.
• A link to a very interesting Special Report on the Merchandising of Mummies Alive was added to the MA Behind the Scenes Page.
• Code to access the Stockwiz Search Engine was added to the Search Engine section of LK's Domain.

Wed, December 16, 1998

• The Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index was updated, and now indexes 951 Mummies Alive related pages from 59 different sites.

Sun, December 6, 1998

• My nephew Cory Spiegel plays guitar/vocals in the band "Euphoria". I added a link to Euphoria's web site on my home page.

Tues, December 1, 1998

• Brenna and Brittany's Mummies Alive Home Page celebrates its 1st Birthday this month. With over 100 hits a day, it has had 36,000 hits to its homepage, and over 100,000 hits to the 13 pages comprising it. Almost 2000 surveys have been filled in, and most exciting to us were the interviews with Seth Kearsley and Robby London.

Mon, November 30, 1998

• I moved Generations / Reunion ahead of The Master Genealogist in the Best Programs section of my Genealogical Program Links Page.

Sun, November 15, 1998

• Completed the November update of the Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index. Now 838 Mummies Alive related pages from 50 different sites are indexed.

Sun, November 8, 1998

• Nope! The MindIt Box on this page didn't work out. This page uses server side includes and every time the hit counter increased, MindIt thought the page changed. I removed the MindIt Box.

Sat, November 7, 1998

• The New Addams Family is now highlighted on Brenna and Brittany's pages. And don't miss Brittany's "Oh Great Maharaja" with Brenna's drawing.

Thu, November 5, 1998

• Unfortunately, Linkies was not working out (see October 24th), and the Link to it from Brenna and Brittany's Mummies Alive Page was removed.

Sun, October 25, 1998

• Major changes, corrections, and additions were made to bring my Genealogical Program Links Page up to date.

Sat, October 24, 1998

• Added the Mind-it box at the top of this page, to allow e-mail notification of when something significant at my site is updated. (This was later removed on Nov 8)

• was added to Brenna and Brittany's Mummies Alive Home Page. It is a link back to the Cartoons Forum page that lists selected Cartoon web sites in order of popularity. (This was later removed on Nov 5)

Thu, October 15, 1998

• The Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index has been updated. There are now 795 Mummies Alive related webs pages included in the index.

Wed, October 14, 1998

• The Genealogical Institute page has been updated with information for the Fall of 1998.
• The September 1998 Newsletter is now included in the JHSWC Newsletter page.

Thu, October 1, 1998

• Announcing My Domain: lkessler.com to be specializing in Search Tools and Offline Browsing.
• For now check out my Mummies Alive Search Page as an example of how a good Search Tool should work.
• My Summary Page now includes statistics from lkessler.com
• More coming soon!

Thu, October 1, 1998

• We (Louis, Brenna, and Brittany) won the Mummies Alive Virtual San Francisco Key for our:

  "great demonstration of leadership in starting SOMA - the Supporters of Mummies Alive".

Tue, September 15, 1998

• The Mummies Alive Full Text Search Index has been reindexed. Now there are 511 Mummies Alive web pages indexed including about 10 new M.A. web sites that came into existence in the last two weeks.

Sun, September 6, 1998

• We now have 1500 Mummies Alive surveys summarized on our Survey Results page.

Wed, September 2, 1998

• Three weeks of hard work has paid off. I have implemented a fantastic Full-Text Search Engine for use by Mummies Alive fans. It is full of powerful and useful features. Go to the Mummies Alive Web Search Page and try it. It indexes all the text from 322 web pages from all the Mummies Alive related sites on the web.

Sun, August 23, 1998

• Modified the Mummies Alive survey, updating the questions, and adding dropdown boxes for the State/Prov and Country to further simplify data tabulation.

Mon, August 3, 1998

• Worked with Brenna and Brittany to completely update their pages:
  Brenna's page
  Brittany's page
  B & B's TV page
  B & B's Movie page

Thurs, July 30, 1998

• My Genealogical Program Links page was listed as one of Web Guide Monthly's 800 Best Rated Sites of the year. See the August 1998 and September 1998 issues, page 91. (Note: Magazine and its website ceased publication in late 2000)

Tues, July 21, 1998

• The June 1998 Newsletter was added to the JHSWC Newsletter page.

Sun, June 19, 1998

• Major additions and corrections to my Genealogical Program Links page.

Fri, June 5, 1998

• 1000 Mummies Alive surveys are now summarized on our Survey Results page.

Mon, June 1, 1998

• This one is somewhat transparent to visitors, but I semi-automated our Mummies Alive survey so that results can be updated more easily.

Wed, May 20, 1998

• The April 1998 Newsletter was added to the JHSWC Newsletter page.

Tue, April 7, 1998

• Our Mummies Alive Pages became part of the newly formed Mummies Alive Webring. (See July 12, 2000 for what happened next)

Sat, April 4, 1998

• We put up a very interesting Interview we had with Robby London, Executive Vice President Creative Affairs of DIC Entertainment.

Sun, March 29, 1998

• We now have results for 600 Mummies Alive surveys on our Survey Results page.

Sat, March 21, 1998

• Brenna and Brittany's Mummies Alive Home Page has become the first page on my site to reach 10,000 hits ... and it did so in just over 3 months. It is now averaging 130 hits a day.
• Brenna and Brittany made extensive additions and updates to their Top TV Picks and Top Movie Picks. They reevaluated their ratings and are much tougher judges than they used to be.

Sat, March 14, 1998

• Updated the Genealogical Institute page with information about current activities and new links.

Tues, March 10, 1998

• We were granted an "exclusive" interview with Seth Kearsley - the Producer and Director of Mummies Alive. We have posted the Interview on its own page in our Mummies Alive section.

Fri, February 27, 1998

• We have been involved in the formation of a group called "Supporters of Mummies Alive on the Web" - made up of M.A. fans around the Internet. The group has its own Home Page, as well as a How to Join and Links page.
• We have left the Animation Ring in favor of the Supporters for Mummies Alive group.
• Since the M. A. Support pages have their own links, the Mummies Alive Links and Toys page had the links removed and the page was renamed.
• A Wordsearch was added to the Mummies Alive Quiz page.

Tues, February 17, 1998

• Spice Girls and Tongue Twisters make their way to Brenna and Brittany's pages.
• Brittany's Mummies Alive drawing is on our Mummies Alive Results page.
• New information about the Mummies Alive Toys.

Sat, February 14, 1998

• We tabulated the first 300 Mummies Alive surveys received and posted the results on our Survey Results page.

Sat, February 7, 1998

• A lot of new content on Brenna and Brittany's Mummies Alive Pages.
• Updates to my Genealogical Program Links, Jewish Genealogy Links, and Jewish Winnipeg Links.

Mon, January 19, 1998

• The 1997 Achievements and 1998 Initiatives for the Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada were added to the JHSWC news page.

Mon, January 5, 1998

• Brenna and Brittany's Mummies Alive Page simply became too big! We relented on our attempt to keep it together and divided it up into nine pages.

Sun, January 4, 1998

• Brenna and Brittany added their show ratings to their Mummies Alive Page.

Thu, January 1, 1998

• This month my Web Site is Celebrating its First Birthday with a birthday banner on my Home Page.

1997 - Highlights of my Web Site's First Year

• January 1997 - the official version of my web site was inaugurated.
• April 1997 - My Computer Chess pages were put up.
• October 1997 - My Genealogy Program Links page was very favorably reviewed in the Sept/Oct 1997 issue of WebGuide magazine.
• November 1997 - My site was named the "Link of the Month" by the Norresundby Chess Club in Denmark.
• December 1997 - was Mummies Alive month, as Brenna and Brittany worked with me to develop their wonderful fan page.

Sat, December 27, 1997

• A magnificent set of graphics were added to Brenna and Brittany's Mummies Alive Page.

Thu, December 25, 1997

• More with our Mummies Alive page. The page has now become part of the Animation Ring. See our cute link to the ring near the bottom of the Mummies page.

Mon, December 22, 1997

• Added a quiz onto Brenna and Brittany's Mummies Alive Page which incorporates a somewhat unique use of JavaScript. Each answer pops up in an "Alert" box.

Tues, December 16, 1997

• Major additions to Brenna and Brittany's Mummies Alive Page. Among the inclusions is a survey for all the fans of the show to fill out.

Sat, December 13, 1997

• I prepared a document for the Special Interest Group for Romanian Genealogy (ROM-SIG). It is a compilation of the experience we gained from our Cemetery Photography Project. It is on ROM-SIG's web site and is a detailed guide to help in Planning a Cemetery Photography Project.

Wed, December 10, 1997

• Brenna and Brittany prepared their Mummies Alive page. I believe this is the first fan-page put up for this soon-to-be-very-popular cartoon.

Sun, November 23, 1997

• Surnames of those interviewed in Oral History Projects were added to J-GEMS.
• Final corrections for the burials in the eight Jewish Cemeteries in Manitoba (C1-C8) were made to J-GEMS.

Tue, November 11, 1997

• The November 1997 Newsletter of the Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada has been put up.

Sun, November 9, 1997

• With the completion of the Cemetery Photography Project, I removed my Cemetery Project Plan page.

Fri, November 7, 1997

• My web site was selected as the "Link of the Month" for November 1997 by the Norresundby Chess Club in Denmark:

  "What's the connection between genealogy, chess and computers? Well, one answer is Louis Kessler's impressive website, our Link of the Month in November. Kessler was a pioneer in computer chess, and chess/computer chess is a cornerstone in Kessler's Internet home, but there is much more and the site requires more than one visit."

Tues, November 4, 1997

• Our society's amazing Cemetery Photography Project is completed and the Final Report for the project is now posted.
• The Genealogical Institute page has been updated to reflect the completion of the Cemetery Photography project.

Sun, November 2, 1997

• Beanie Babies and Nanos have taken over our lives. Check out Brenna and Brittany's updates to their pages.

Sun, October 26, 1997

• Just found Omnitsky's on the web using Infoseek. This demands a new category of "Cuisine" in my Jewish Winnipeg Links.
• Information added to My Family Research page about the KIVES/KIEVES family and their connection to the BRAUNSTEINs.
• Several updates to my Computer Chess Books page, including new links to more information about the books.

Wed, October 22, 1997

• Important updates to my Jewish Genealogical Links, including a new section for Jewish Genealogical Conferences.

Mon, October 13, 1997

• Major additions made to my Jewish Winnipeg Links, including a new section for National organizations.

Thu, October 9, 1997

• My Genealogical Program Links page was reviewed in the September/October issue of Web Guide Magazine:

  "If you're looking for genealogical programs for your computer, stop right here. This beautifully organized site offers a comprehensive list of computer genealogy programs and related information. ..."
  "Content:9 Design:9 Navigability:9 Links:10"

Tue, September 30, 1997

• Added Top Page Accesses and the Top Web Page for each month to my Access Stats.

Wed, September 17, 1997

• On the JHSWC page, added more information about the Fall's upcoming events and lectures for the Genealogical Institute.
• Also on the JHSWC page, replaced the "Previous Activities" section with links to "Other Sites With Related Information".

Wed, September 3, 1997

• Major revisions to the Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada home page - including information about how to get research assistance.

Sun, August 31, 1997

• New information for my KUSHNEER and ZASLOVSKY families on My Family Research page.
• Also a photograph of the KUSHNEER family.

Mon, August 25, 1997

• I put up my Computer Chess Books page.
• This completed most of the pages I had planned for in the short term. The "What's New/Coming Soon" page was changed back to "What's New". Keep tuned. Some exciting things are still left for the long term.

Thu, August 21, 1997

• My Desired Features in a Genealogical Program page (removed Sept 23 2001) joined the Reunion Web Ring.

Wed, July 30, 1997

• Made another batch of changes and additions to my Computer Chess Links. Added a number of links, split out "My own Journey into Computer Chess", and added "Machine vs Machine" and "Books Available on Computer Chess" sections.

Fri, July 25, 1997

• Nine of my pages were listed by Yahoo in 12 categories. This is what is now listed.
• In addition, Yahoo Canada created a new category for the Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada.

Wed, July 23, 1997

• Made major revisions to my Genealogical Program Links. Of most significance, is the acquisition of Reunion for Windows by Sierra On-Line, and the merging of Family Gathering and Roots V into the Ultimate Family Tree.

Sun, July 20, 1997

• Posted a very witty Interview with Deep Blue by John Burstow.
• Made major revisions to my Computer Chess Links.

Fri, July 11, 1997

• My Home Page had its 1000'th access.

Thu, July 3, 1997

• My Stars have a special new flavor and a new star.

Fri, June 20, 1997

• Added the June 1997 Newsletter of the Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada.

Tues, June 10, 1997

• Created my Desired Features in a Genealogical Program page (removed Sept 23 2001)

Sun, May 4, 1997

• Computer Chess - Finished off my Unfinished Work and Challenges to Chess Programmers section.

Tue, April 29, 1997

• Computer Chess - A Memorial to BRUTE FORCE
• BRUTE FORCE Chess game viewer (with thanks to Jack Woodbury)
• Chess and Computer Chess Links

Sun, March 30, 1997

• Added the Spring 1997 Newsletter of the Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada.

Wed, March 26, 1997

• I added my page with Links to web sites of Computer Programs for Genealogy. I was surprised that I could not find an up-to-date list like this anywhere on the Internet ... so finally here is one.

Tues, March 18, 1997

• Updated activity list of the Genealogical Institute.

Tues, March 11, 1997

• Fixed a bug in my BEHOLD survey that caused a "500 Server Error" message when the submit key was pressed. Strange thing that was - there were some soft returns in the CGI script, resulting in the error for Netscape users, but submitting ok for Internet Explorer. Score 1 for IE.

Mon, March 10, 1997

• Reorganized the Genealogical Institute page.

Thu, February 27, 1997

• Reorganized my Home Page, to make access to all my pages easier.
• Set up my first two Links to Useful Sites - Jewish Genealogy Links, and Jewish Winnipeg Links. Check them out! I have put in many features you will not find in other lists of links.
• J-GEMS: Indexed over 20 grade-six Family History projects completed in January 1996 at Ramah Hebrew school.
• J-GEMS: Added entries for two marvelous web sites, of Jay Nitikman, and Bruce Bertram.

Thu, February 6, 1997

• This page, my "What's New" page, now also contains what's "Coming Soon".

Sun, February 2, 1997

• Added access stats and a top-ten list of my most accessed pages.

Tues, January 7, 1997

• First cut of my "Official" pages put up. Included sections for My Genealogy Pages, My Family Research, Cemetery Photography Project, Beginning Genealogy, The Genealogical Institute, the Jewish Historical Society, and J-GEMS (all three moved to JHCWC April 28, 1999), BEHOLD, My Stars (later merged into my home page), and Your Last Stop.

Tue, August 27, 1996

• My "Coming Soon" page was put up as a trial, to test the site and get some initial reaction. Included two test pages, one with a survey, and many "vaporlinks" - i.e. links to various flavors of "nowhere".