Study Nature.
Love Nature.
Be close to Nature.
It will never fail you.
~Frank Lloyd Wright
The personal details of our ancestors lives transform their genealogy into a family history.
In TNG, these details of biographical or historical interest can be added to the an individual person’s page through addition of custom event types.
From the Edit view of the person’s page, the administrator can create Events under “Other Events”. In the “Detail” [...]
Humans feel more comfortable when they know what to expect. They’re more relaxed within familiar surroundings. With a little planning it’s possible to make them feel right at Home on each and every page of a website.
Drop menus exist by default in the upper right corner of most core TNG pages. These menus organize [...]
A large part of my work consists of customizing genealogy websites powered by TNG.
While TNG is a powerful application for bringing one’s genealogy to the web, the display and layout of pages “out of the box” is somewhat outdated with respect to web standards. I’ve been using TNG since 2004 and the page layouts are [...]
I’ve been working on a major project over at Husing.org.
I had free reign on the site, so chose to couple WordPress and TNG.
I used the incredible ThemeHybrid for the framework in WordPress and it’s a joy to work with.
Inspiration for the color scheme came a simple question to the owner, “What’s your favorite color?”.
Imagine my [...]
I’m finishing up a project over at Koen Colpaert“s new “stamboom”.
Coen had asked me to work up a custom TNG layout to match WordPress “Tarski” theme.
The main WordPress page as rendered by the Tarski theme looks like this:
We skipped the TNG homepage and directed the “Genealogy” link to TNG’s surname page instead. I love the [...]
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My favorite FireFox plugin of all time, ColorZilla, now has the ability to analyze the colors of a web page and create a corresponding palette.
Here’s a sampling of out of the box color scheme for TNG pages with default styles governed by genstyle.css:
I’m not sure what the rhyme or reason was for the choice of [...]
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In an earlier post back in September of 2008, I mentioned my work over at Generations Gone By but we’ve done a lot of small things since then to continuously update the look of this genealogy site.
This site was initially built with the Template 4 design included with TNG.
When Sharon Randall approached me for help, [...]
I’m working on a project with a Sharon over at Generations Gone By who has a special affinity for the “Places” category of her family history.
The addition of GoogleMap functionality to TNG fueled the fire of this inspiration. There was a need for more place pins…
In TNG>Admin>Setup>Map Settings>Help:Map Settings
Place Levels Pins: Labels and Colors
Each geocode [...]
Old bookjackets are a great resource for page layout inspiration.
The artwork is royalty free and examples are easily found in the public domain.
I ran across this one a while back and loved the simple landscape shapes of the tree near a cabin near which stands a cock crowing at the sunrise.
Peaceful and well-placed country elements gather [...]
I’m working on styling TNG with the default WordPress Tarski theme.
Here’s the color palette from ColorZilla:
#e5cfd2 -mauve
#a8001c -red
#006a80 -turquoise
#cfe2e5 – sky blue
# 8fbf60 -lime green
# ece9d8 -concrete gray
One major issue was the default Tarski #wrapper 760px fixed width.
Because much of the data in TNG is laid out in tables, content rich pages need a minimum [...]