Technical problems?

Private, it is having issues. :( I've been working this week with the service providers to figure out what is going wrong, but it's been a slow process because I use free services for hosting / database. I've made some recent changes that I hope might help it - keeping my fingers crossed.

Thank you, Jeff! It's such a great program and I really appreciate your setting it up and keeping it running.

It's not you, Kelly (well, may be it is <grin>, but it's not JUST you).

I also was using it today, and it would sometimes work and sometimes not. Poor Jeff has been working with trying to diagnose the issues for a week now, it seems.

It seems to sort of be working now.

However, I still have trouble consistently switching to another profile as the starting point.

For example, using my wife as a starting point (http://historylink.herokuapp.com/history?profile=profile-g600000001...) gives that it only scans 5 profiles and then stops ... but she has way more ancestors than that on Geni!

Dan, Kelly will not be able to view your link - it's outside her permission scope unless you've granted her Family Group access. I've run your wife and didn't see it stopping at 5 profiles. If you want to run it again, I'll watch the logs for any errors.

re: private ... I know that ... but it shouldn't have stopped for me ... trying now ... it must have known you were watching <grin> ... working now.

... but now seems hung at "41 profiles compared". Clicked the "Stop", restarted search (answering affirmative to the 'clear previous' question), and the first 20 came up quickly, but then 'hangs' again after "41 profiles compared".

I have all the options except MP selected.

Thanks Dan, I was watching the logs. It didn't give any error, just kept looping. What I don't understand is why it would do something different for me as it is looking at the same profiles.

Dan Cornett, can you try again? Made a change based on our prior difficulties with DB connectivity. Also, what browser are you using? It works fine for you, but not your wife?

Oh, another thing I just thought about... not sure the "Problem Profile" option works with our curator permissions any longer (identifying Zombies & Private profiles), since we no longer get an error when trying to query it.

re: Problem profiles ... I was wondering about that ...

re: looping: same browser. Will check...

I've seen it crashed a couple times. Seems to happen when several people are hitting it at once. I might try to replace the underlining DB interface. Currently using python-mysqldb, but looking at alternatives.

The search on my wife's profile went fine.

Then I tried my son-in-law:

parents 25 / 2 25 / 2
grand parents 46 / 4 71 / 6
great grandparents 103 / 8 174 / 14
2nd great grandparents 209 / 16 383 / 30

... definitely some odd numbers!

I have found that after changing from the default person (e.g.: yourself) the first time, things are fine. However, changing to another (3rd) person does not behave properly. If I then click the HistoryLink icon, taking me back to the 'home' screen, and click the "Get Started!" button -- which reverts the default person to yourself -- then changing to the desired other profile ... then things work o.k.

In other words, changing the "root person" does not appear to 'clean up' properly after the first change (from the default to Person "A" works fine; changing to "B" does not work unless on 'reverts-to-default' first by going back to http://historylink.herokuapp.com

Seems to be working much better. Thank you for all your hard work, Jeff! I understand that you even spent some of your vacation working on it. That's dedication!

The only slight problem I can still find is that there are several profile that I know are in projects that aren't showing up. For example, Daniel Thompson (Daniel Thompson Phillips) is in the Oregon Pioneers project, but isn't showing up on my HistoryLink list. Could be a caching problem on my end or maybe it just takes a while for profiles to propigate into projects.

I only update the project profiles periodically. I think once a week. It takes a long time to run. You can, however, refresh a project yourself by clicking the little circle arrows icon next to the project name in historylink.

Oh, that's good to know and I'll give it a try. Thanks again!

I don't want to be demanding or looking a gifthorse in the mouth - but are you aware that the beautiful colours for country of birth have vanished into grey :-(
If you know about it, please just ignore me - but I've been playing with this magical application for what seems like 72 hrs straight. It's like a wonderful Christmas present - and being able to see where countries of birth are missing, meant that I went back to fill them in: and now they're not showing at all anymore :-(

And question 2: Private User
- having just started to explore the wonderful possibilities of the famous people search page - What is the best way to add projects to it?

I've put in the links for the SA French Huguenot Settler Project: http://www.geni.com/projects/SA-French-Huguenot-Settlers/8652 & the Famous South Africans Project http://www.geni.com/projects/Famous-South-Africans/3516 in the bar provided, but they don't immediately appear in the list below.
I'm not in a hurry for them to, but want to make sure I'm doing it right - as there are a number of other Famous People projects I'd like to add too.

Thank you for the report Sharon Doubell. The first issue is a Geni problem. I've submitted a ticket to Geni (#53970) and created a discussion thread in the API group http://www.geni.com/discussions/130093

Question 2, both projects were added. Not sure why they didn't automatically show up for you. Sometimes they can take longer to query then the allotted timeout, so it may just take a page refresh after a minute to get them to show up (once they've populated the database).

Thanks Jeff - that answers both questions,

The location issue has been resolved. Thanks Geni team for the quick fix!

I'm sure that it's just me, but for several weeks, I have not been able to get HistoryLink to work for me at all. I click start search and it just sits there. I'm using IE8 on XP, but it works just fine with my husband's Firefox on Vista.

Private, if you can - log out at the bottom and then try again. Maybe it's an authentication issue. Otherwise, I suspect it could be an IE8 problem. I've only tested on IE10, FF, Chrome.

Kelly ... can you get onto Geni at all? On Windows 7, at the location I'm currently sitting and with the network administrator constraints, I can't even get IE v9 to log into Geni.com ... which means the HistoryLink won't work.

However, on the same machine. same time, I *can* get in with either Firefox or Chrome.

people still use internet exploder (er explorer) gave that crappy browser up after one too many blue screen of doom and never looked back.. fire fox and chrome are better!

Thank you, Jeff. Since it looks like IE10 isn't compatible with XP, I may just have to use HistoryLink on my husband's Firefox.

Dan -- I have no problem using Geni or any other sites, except HistoryLink.

Michael -- If anything, my husband's Firefox on Vista crashes more often than my IE8 on XP. No blue screens yet for me, but I'm sure that as technology advances, I will have to upgrade someday.

Private, I've made some IE8 compatibility adjustments which should allow you to run the History Search portion of the site (though the formatting looks off). The Ancestor Graph will still be unsupported due to the dependencies in the graph visualization library.

I'd certainly recommend downloading Firefox like your husband or my preferred browser, Google Chrome. I say this for website compatibility / standards, but from the perspective of a computer security professional. Your browser is the #1 target for exploit, so running IE8 as your default is putting your computer at higher risk for compromise.

Seems to work just fine now, Jeff. Thank you! I'll definitely think about switching to Firefox though, just to be on the safe side.

Jeff there's something off about this project title (an extra space?) & it's not picking up the profiles in history link http://www.geni.com/project-14314. I don't think it's the app -but when i just put in the numbers it still isn't taking.