Eliafamily:Community Portal

From Eliafamily

Current revision as of 21:32, 14 July 2007

The Elia Family Project currently contains 234 articles.

The purpose of the Community Portal page is to provide some guidance for how we can build the Elia Family Project - a kind of global To Do List. In this section, you can find the "decision" about what the priorities of the website will be. On the Discussion page (see link at the top) will be the Community Blog, in which anyone may post their suggestions, feedback, requests, and opinions about the website and what its priorities should be.

Rather than removing entries that are "done", the entries should instead be given a strikethrough. For example, to code To Do Item 3 as "done", apply the del markup:

* To Do Item 1
* To Do Item 2
* <del>To Do Item 3</del>
* To Do Item 4

renders as:

• To Do Item 1
• To Do Item 2
• To Do Item 3
• To Do Item 4

This appropriately indicates that nothing is ever "done" on this website - only "begun". Even a "finished" item on the to do list is game for further editing and improvement.

Biographies

If you are reading biographies, you can edit and write them too! All help is appreciated and encouraged. Don't be overwhelmed, just jump right in. For a little guidance, though, check out the Guide To Editing and the Style Guide For Biographies. Or, when in doubt, just find a biography, click edit, and type!

Transfer and Update

Completed.

All of the biographies from the old site have been transfered to these pages!

New Biographies

It is also desirable to get a biography online for all members of the Elia family. Most needed are members of the first and second generations. Many in the older generations might not be as used to working with websites and computers, so it is going to be important for their children and grandchildren to provide these biographies. Most needed:

• Charlie Elia - but more needed
• Josephine Piraino
• Nick Elia
• Mary Jean Mody
• Charles Elia
• Theresa Genchur
• Anthony Elia II

Help Pages

Several help pages have been set up, and all help pages will be linked to the Help:Contents page, available on the left-hand Navigation menu. Planned pages are:

• Help:WikiReading - to be a guide about Reading A Wiki-style website like this one
• Help:LineageStyle - a style guide for our lineage pages
• Help:CalendarStyle - a style guide for our calendar pages
• Help:AlmanacStyle - a style guide for our almanac pages
• Help:EditingFAQ - meant to be a quick guide to common editing questions
• Help:StepchildrenPolicy - a policy statement about how to handle adoption, remarriage, stepchildren, in-laws, etc.
• Help:NameChangePolicy - a how to for dealing with divorce or marriage involving a name chage
• Help:RecipeStyle - a style guide for our recipe pages

Important Dates

Calendar (Months of the Year)

All of the calendar pages have been created and transferred from the old site. It will be important to maintain these pages with new weddings, births, and other important events.

Almanac (The Elia Timeline)

A page can be created for every year. The goal is to place all significant dates not only on the calendar (month pages) but also on the almanac (year pages). This would allow one to look back in time at the historical events occurring over the last century or more. The year pages currently created are found here:

• Category:Almanac

Note though that this only shows the year pages that have at least one entry. Whenever you see a year in red, you can add the event referred to in order to start the page. You may want to check out the style guide for the almanac first:

Help:AlmanacStyle

A new initiative is to add one small picture to each almanac page as a glimpse of what was going on in the world that year. (See 2006 for an example.)

Recipes

I have created a Help style guide so that we can add recipes to the site. A few have been added already, taken from the book that Rebecca St. John put together for the 2004 Reunion. Recipes should be linked to the author's biography page and also on the Recipe category page.

Special Articles

An article on the Prinz Adalbert is already online describing some of the history of the boat that Maria Elia took to America. I'm hoping to have more articles of this nature which give an Elia-centric description of certain places, events, activities, and objects. I encourage anyone to contribute any sort of article like this. Some of the ones that are planned include:

• 22 Griffin Street
• Brown's Station
• gardening
• golf
• Norwich
• Norwich Knitting Mill
• Province of Messina
• Serendipity
• St. Bartholomew's Church
• The Purple Mushroom Band
• United States Air Force

Some of these will likely be tackled soon, although they are a lower priority than copying old biographies and dates from the old site. I encourage anyone to tackle these or others, and to get creative. For golf, for example, I plan to list the surprising number of Elias who have called this a major hobby. It will be a chance for us to find connections with each other, and with our ancestors.

Reunions

Historically, the reunions were a big part of the motivation behind the webpage. In addition to providing a source for upcoming reunion information, I would also like to add pictures, descriptions, and memories of previous reunions. This would include the recent ones in Norwich as well as the past reunions in Kingston and Canandaigua. (Note the Elia barn logo in the upper left!)

Eliminate 'Links To Nowhere'

Check out this link:

• Special:Wantedpages

This list shows what the most common references are to pages that don't exist yet. If you can create one of the pages at the top of the list, you'll have created a page that can be arrived at from a lot of different places on the website.

And here's a cool trick: once you create the page in question, while on that newly-created page, click the link "What links here" in the left-hand "Toolbox". You can immediately see all of the pages that link to your new page.

Photos

In the past several years, most of the free photo sites have expanded their free services. In the old days, we were limited to about 10 photos per Elia. Some of the old photos I had online even got deleted when the service I was using changed its policies.

I have started a new account at Yahoo! Photos and am tranferring all of the Elia photos I have to that account. In addition, I have the ability now to add more photos and larger photos to the site, which claims it will accept unlimited numbers of photos.

Unlike the family website, where you can create your own account, only I have access to the photo account. You can email me photos to include on the site, or you can ask me for my Yahoo password and upload and edit them yourself.

We can also keep a limited number of photos on this website as well, but here, our space is limited. Please keep uploads to this site small. In general, one photo per biography or article should be sufficient; in special cases a small photo gallery would be all right. (See the Maria and Nicola Elia biography for an example.)