~ ANNOUNCEMENT ~

Due to the time demands of the MAPCO : Map And Plan Collection Online website, it is unlikely that I will be able to respond to questions relating to The Hale Connection website for the remainder of 2007. I sincerely apoligise for any inconvenience this may cause.

In the meantime, you may find that the information you are looking for is already displayed on the site. There are over 150 pages of Hale information displayed here, so use the Search box above to check through the site.

Good luck!

10 February 2006

The Hale Connection now has its own domain name!

Please note our new address and update your bookmark:

The Hale Connection
haleconnection.net

The companion map site that I have been developing is now up and running. It is at:

MAPCO : Map And Plan Collection Online
archivemaps.com

I hope that you find the maps of use in your family history research.

28 January 2006

I am currently developing a companion site to The Hale Connection which will contain high quality scans of city maps and plans. The focus is on London maps and also on Adelaide, South Australia, where my ancestors arrived in 1879. The site will be a great research aid, and hopefully will not take me away from this site for any great length of time.

Initially there will be three maps on the site. Follow this link if you would like a sneak preview of Cross's New Plan Of London 1850:

MAPCO
Map And Plan Collection Online

Finally, I realise that I still have numerous unanswered emails from late 2005. Please bear with me... I will be replying to these soon.

1 January 2006

Happy New Year to you all!

You may be interested to know that the site has had 609 hits since December 21... that's about 61 hits a day, compared to the average of 4 hits a day since the site opened in 1999. I assume that people are interested in the new design?

With soaring temperatures here in South Australia (it was 43C here on December 30!) I have been staying indoors quite close to the air-conditioner, doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work on the website. It is all 'boring stuff' to do with the site structure and code, but it all improves the way the site runs and is administered.

I do apologise if you contacted me during 2005 and have not yet received a reply. The website redesign took up a lot of my spare time, but things are looking better for 2006. I am working through all of my unanswered emails from last year, and now have only 40 messages left to respond to! Many of these require research assistance or website updates, so it will still take a little while to catch up. Thank you for your patience.

Best wishes for a healthy, happy and safe year to come.

David.

21 December 2005

Just a few technical notes about the new site before I start some Christmas wrapping.

I have designed the site for a screen area of 800x600 pixels. I believe that most users have their monitors set at a 800x600 pixel screen area, so for most visitors the header and the webpages will fill the screen from side to side.

Secondly, there is script that runs whenever a page is loaded, changing the header images and doing a few other things as well. If things don't appear to be working for you please do let me know.

Finally for now, most of the text on this site should appear in a more-or-less uniform size. Obviously titles etc. will be set up at different sizes, but the in-text links should look the same size as the text around them. I know that this is a real problem for Mac users, so I will try to fix this problem in early 2006.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

David.

20 December 2005

Finally! At last! After a long year of transferring all of the site data... The Hale Connection website has a new look! My sincere thanks to you all for your support and patience during this period of redevelopment.

There will no doubt be problems with the new site... dead links, missing data, etc.,... I still have much work to do in 2006 to bring the site up to standard, and there will be lots of interesting information added throughout the course of the year.

So, welcome to the new-look site. A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!