New and rejuvenated Jones Valley website — and Gil’s plea to you

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This is the text to an email that went to the family email list and will also be posted on Facebook. NOTE: it is posted using the quick and easy blogging from the front page of the website. No techie stuff needed.

Dear family,

First of all, how does the website relate to our family Facebook page? The complement one another. FB is sort of a fleeting, instant communication and gratification process whereas this website is a more permanent and organized place. And, not everyone is on Facebook (sometimes I wonder why I am!), but everyone can see what’s here even if not logged in. Most things you would put on FB could/should be posted as a blog entry here. Much of the information on this website would be hard to do on FB and even harder to find later. Use both!

The website began back in 2005 as www.jonesvalley.us/drupal. That site is no longer updated and will soon be taken down entirely. We are now using www.jonesvalley.us/wp (accessible by simply www.jonesvalley.us without the need for the /wp part — unless your browser is remembering the old one in which case you may need to explicitly use www.jonesvalley.us/wp for a while). Whew, too much techie stuff.
We are now on a WordPress site for a purely selfish, personal reason — it’s far easier to work with and keep updated with security enhancements and to add new capabilities.
I have now accomplished two things:
  1. All original content from the old site like pages of ancestors and photos has been replicated on the new site.
  2. All blog entries from the old site have be re-posted on the new site. At first I was manually forcing the date to be the original posting date so they would appear in order but that was taking too long. You sell see a note on each as to the original date.

Most of the photos and documents that were on the old site have been moved including those embedded in blog entries and those in albums. A few more remain to be moved.

I hope you will each do just a few things:
  1. Enjoy the fresh look and (I think) better organization, and if you have suggestions or problems, email me directly to my email address via this link.
  2. Register as a user on the site if you have not already. Go here to sign in or register. You must be logged in to do certain things on the site.
  3. Be certain that someone in your family line is in charge of getting your part of the Family Tree filled in with lots of branches and leaves. That person will need additional authoring privileges in order to add pages to the tree.
  4. Navigate via the Tree to your own spot and if it’s not there, get your family webperson to add it.
  5. Use the comment feature that appears on every page and every blog entry. You can add relevant information or ask a question there.
  6. Use the blogging feature. It’s easy. There is a link on the home page that takes you straight to that function. Again, you must be logged in to use it.
  7. Use both the blogging here and Facebook (if you are a FB user) to capture your thoughts about and contributions to the lore of the Clingman-Jones family.
Kudos to Mike White for his tremendous effort in gathering, digitizing, and organized an immense amount of material about the family. He and I will be working hard to get it accessible by you on this site. Stay tuned!
This email will also be posted as a log entry at www.jonesvalley.us, and will not destruct in 15 seconds.

Ya gonna say something or just be a drive-by?

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