Personalizing the Web

Almost everyday, Mona Magno-Veluz surfs the World Wide Web and visits a site that is very close to her heart. She has seen this site from its very beginning and has witnessed its development and growth. And she wants her children and her children’s children to see and also use it.

The site is nothing spectacular. It doesn’t have any fancy graphics or any moving or talking objects. But it contains information that gives a background to Mona’s life.

It contains her family’s history.

The Magno-Veluz Chronicles (www.homestead.com/magno-veluz) attempts to trace the beginnings of Mona’s family – the Magnos – and her husband’s – the Veluzes. It began as a mere hobby for Mona who is a self-taught genealogist and who has become her family’s unofficial historian, interviewing relatives during wakes, reunions and weddings.

"I am notorious for interviewing those I’ve never met before – complete with tape recorder and a laptop. After two years of talking to so many people – my lolos, lolas, great aunts, neighbors of a deceased uncle, you name it – I realized I actually knew so much more about my family and my husband’s than any single person did," she recalls.

It was then that she thought about putting up a website that would contain all the information she has gathered. After a month of work, she launched the site at a family reunion during Christmas of 1999.

Mona, who works as director for market development and communications for Ericsson Phils., is not alone. There is probably millions of people like her who have found the Web a convenient archive for their personal information. Some, like machine shop owner Jun Fajardo, have put up sites that contain their personal favorites. Fajardo, for one, has created his Lord Skorpio site (www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Towers/9585/ls.htm) to contain his list of favorite actors, sports figures and friends in one archive which he designed in a very artistic manner. And there are even groups – like the Class ’77 of Paco Catholic School – which have created websites that contain info on their members.

Universal library

The Web, undoubtedly, has proved true to the vision of its creators to serve as the world’s biggest library, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

More than 40 years before it was officially launched, the concept of the Web had already been articulated by Dr. Vannevar Bush when he was still director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the United States.

In his article The Way We Are published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic magazine, Bush, who had coordinated the work of some 6,000 leading scientists, urged experts to turn their efforts into making a "more accessible" storehouse for the bewildering amount of knowledge they had accumulated.

"Man’s spirit would be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems," he said. "Man has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records... His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important."

Bush probably had not thought about how volumes and volumes of scientific data could be stored and retrieved with just one click of a button when he wrote his forward-looking piece.

But Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with giving birth to the World Wide Web, shared Bush’s vision when he said that the Web would offer universal readership. "If information is available, then any person should be able to access it from anywhere in the world," he said.

Building your home

However, accessing is one thing; storing information is another. Early users of the Web found it hard and expensive to put up and maintain their own sites. In the Philippines, the first ones to have the distinction to attach a dot-com to their name were big universities. Even affluent individuals found the idea of creating their own site impractical.

Thanks, though, to new technologies. Now, there at least five big sites that offer site-building tools to anyone and free site hosting to boot. GeoCities (www.geocities.com) was among the earliest to serve as free home to personal websites. It has a page-building tool for people at every level of ability. If you don’t know HTML (the programming language used in the Internet) but you want a more sophisticated webpage, then GeoCities offers you PageBuilder which lets you create whatever you want using one of 20 templates available. You just have to click and drag to add, move and resize items on your Webpage, or fill dialogue boxes to insert links – all without leaving your Web browser.

Yahoo!, an established Internet search site, bought GeoCities a couple of years ago. It has added new features to GeoCities’ site-building capability. One of them is the EZ Upload feature. It finds files – pictures, drawings and what-have-you – from your hard drive and uploads them with one click.

Mona says the hardest part in creating her own website was finding the right tool. At first, she experimented with those available online, but she found them slow and produced ugly results. She used FrontPage, a website creation software, instead. And she found the software Family Tree Maker useful in managing the more than 500 names in her site.

Mona chose Homestead (www.homestead.com) to host her site. Although new in the game, Homestead is now considered by many as the most generous of site hosts. It is completely advertisement-free (GeoCities "shares" banner ads with its sites). It allows up to 100 people to collaborate on a site, split maintenance chores or even post new documents or add pages. And it offers 16 megabytes of storage space per site, 1 MB more than GeoCities.

Maintaining ties

Many people who have created their own sites probably did them just for fun. But for Mona, it was more than that. She was driven by something noble.

Her Magno-Veluz Chronicles traces the Magno family’s beginnings in Iloilo City and the Veluz family’s origins in Del Gallego, Camarines Sur. It contains glimpses of world and Philippine history and how these had affected the lives of Mona’s ancestors. And it has a number of feature stories narrating anecdotes on the lives and loves of her predecessors.

She recalls that the initial work was tough, but it eased up along the way. "The website opened doors for more materials to come in from other family members. I even discovered long-lost family members in other countries who accidentally found my site via other genealogy sites. I got several good leads from inputs given by ‘instant’ relatives in Canada, Guam and the United States," she says.

Mona says the best moment in the creation of her website was when she found the baptismal certificate of her mother’s paternal grandfather, with details on his lineage. The document, she discovered, moved back her research to as far back as 1840. "It was my biggest breakthrough yet," she says.

But more than anything, the Magno-Veluz Chronicles serves as a link for members of the two families. Mona says the site has managed to raise awareness of the Web’s personal usefulness within her family circle. "It’s really a good communication tool. We sign up for community-family sites where we post party invitations, announce illnesses or deaths, exchange photos and remind each other of birthdays and anniversaries," she says. "It has helped us manage distance better."

And that’s what the World Wide Web is all about – linkages. Without her saying it, Mona is probably aware that the Web has linked her not only to her kin who are alive but also to those who have long died. And it will link her further to those who have yet to come.