The Genealogist

Paul’s Weekly Ponderings

The exciting news this week is about The 1911 UK Census. You may (or there again may not!) remember that I set up a site for a Petition to get the 1911 UK Census released early some months ago.

Well………… I am not claiming that it is entirely down to the signatures we got but I heard the news that the information from the 1911 Census will now be available from January 2007 rather than the original date of January 2012. The aim is to have a fully searchable copy on the Internet by January 2009!

I must admit it’s given me a bit of a buzz! This for me is absolutely what we are about in terms of Marketing on The Internet - really adding value to the niches in which we operate.

If you are one of my subscribers then you will be aware that the last two weeks have been something of a challenge! This all resulted from a major outage by one of our hosting companies which lasted for some time and saw lots of data lost by them. It impacted about 50% of my business with some of our most significant sites going offline and the domain names being inaccessible to amend the DNS for!

So as you can imagine the last few weeks have seen quite a few long days getting things back up and running and I am pleased to say that of this morning almost every major site is now back on line and fully functional. It has also seen the creation of a number of new sites and the redeployment of other sites.

The good news for Genealogists is that our sites at The Amateur Genealogist, Free Genealogy Search Engine, Catholic Genealogy and Genealogy Articles are all now back online!

What have I learnt from the last few weeks? Well in summary here’s my top pieces of advice. Always make sure that you have your hosting spread around a number of major hosts so that you can always shift things around in the event of a problem; ensure that you back up your sites and any databases on a regular basis; ensure that your hosts also back up data on a regular basis. If you are serious about hosting then you need to look at getting a Reseller Account and one of the best that I hav come across is Hostgator who I have found to be excellent.

Finally in terms of my recommendations and this is a big one! Never ever, under any circumstances buy your domain names from your hosts! That way lies complete disaster if your host goes down and you then cannot access your account. If you cannot access your account with your host then you cannot amend the DNS an point your sites to an alternative host.

Now before all that happened I had been well on with my planning for 2007 and thought that I knew what we were going to do! However, the coincidence of the problems with one of our hosts and also reading an excellent report from Niche Mania’s BigMike called “Google Hiccup” set me thinking! If you haven’t taken a look at Niche Mania then you really want to - it’s one of the very few memberhips that I ever recommend for anyone interested in making money online.

The areas we will focus on in terms of our primary niches will remain as originally planned. However, our approach to those niches and the value we will be adding is going to be much mroe focussed.

One of the things that we are currently very focussed on is evolving the highly successful GenMates community and you can read more about that at GenMates Changes - this is a set of changes which is in response to the fedback from our members. I think this is going to be really exciting!

The other two major developments which have suffered a bit of a set back are my Internet Marketing Coaching Site and my Self Improvement Coaching Site - however with a few more days work on these they will be ready to go early in the new year! You can sign up for the heavy discount on the Internet Marketing one by going to Internet Business Creators!

Have a good week and if you are one of my subscribers watch out for a very useful Christmas Gift!

Genealogy Videos and Free Genealogy Search

A site well worth checking out is The Genealogy Videos which is packed with informative, interesting and useful videos for you to enjoy.

You will also want to check out the dedicated Free Genealogy Search Engine.

GenMates Weekly News

Hope that you have had a good week? It’s been quite a long week for me I must admit with a number of large online and offline projects reaching a critical point which has been keeping me busy. I have also been suffering with a stinking cold which is not my idea of fun! Hopefully I will soon be rid of it!

Lest We Forget

Today of course we remember those who have given their lives in the service of us all. As always our home page at British Genealogy has changed to “Lest We Forget” our Remembrance page. As a genealogist I am always reminded of how many of our families lost young men and women at an early age as a result of War whenever I look at our Family Tree.

Suduko/Sudoku

Whichever way you spell it or indeed pronounce it “Suduko” shows no sign of declining in popularity! Everywhere you look people are completing the puzzles be it on trains or trams, buses or at airports! Or you will find them snapping up the shelf after shelf of magazines!

It’s no wonder then that the offer I have made of selling the Private Label Rights to one of my eBooks “Solving Suduko” has proven to be so popular. If you are interested in getting in on the deal then you need to check out Solving Suduko PLR before the figure of 100 sales is reached!

Health Thoughts

Talking of suffering with a stinking cold you will remember that I mentioned last week that we have been working with various medics to put together a series of health related sites. I am pleased to say that the main domain is now fully operational and you can check it out at Your Health Helper. There really is a mass of useful information in there for you.

Free Search Engines

We have had a massive response to the launch of the three search engines we have launched in collaboration with Google and if you haven’t had chance to look at them well now’s your chance! Your can check our Free Genealogy Search Engine and also The Internet Marketing Search Engine by clicking on the relevant link.

We have also launched our own more general search engine (covering Family, Home, Health and Hobbies amongst many others) and that can be found at duxcoo

One Final thought on sites! We have extended the discounted pricing at The eBook Store until the end of November 2006 in response to requests - so some hobby based eBooks for you to grab there!