South Carolina Genealogy

I apologize – I was not aware how bad the forum spam issue had become. There were literally several thousand posts a day of junk from chinese and other asian addresses. I’ve spent most of today cleaning it out on this and one other forum. I’ve disabled registrations for the forum and there will be no new posting allowed there. At some point in the future I may open a new forum, but for the present I’ve pruned out everything that was junk that I could find and tried to leave some of the useful posts. Unfortunately I may have thrown a few good posts out with the 400,000 junk….

I’m sorry if I’ve thrown out a good query or response. Right now I don’t have time to pursue a forum that would be more resistant to spammers and most of the approaches that I’ve seen take more time than I’m able to give it right now.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but I’ve switched off registrations at the moment. Over the last 8 hours we’ve been under an attack of sorts with several registrations per minute. I will reenable registrations at a later point (hopefully soon.)

I hinted last week that there was another sister site on the way. Well, today the Alabama Genealogy site officially launched. You’ll notice that for now we have the same layout as here. As we have here, we have built pages for each county (67) in the state of Alabama with a profile and resources. Of course, there is more work to be done there, here and at the North Carolina Genealogy and Rhode Island Genealogy sites, but there are other sites on the way as well, although it may be a little while before the next official opening.

I know, this may not be of interest to a lot of the South Carolina Genealogy researchers out there, but for those of you researching families in the Northeast as well. We’ve just launched our Rhode Island Genealogy site as a sister to this and the North Carolina Genealogy sites. This doesn’t mean that this site will be neglected, we just wanted to branch out and start covering a wider area. Speaking of which, we hope to have another site announcement coming in the next few weeks. It will be in the south – see keep an eye out for the announcement! Thanks!

Just wanted to pass along that I’ve spent a good part of the day fixing over 150 broken links. Unfortunately there were about a dozen or less that I just had to take out entirely, but the others have been fixed. It just came to my attention that there were so many broken links yesterday and I installed a broken link checker to police the links and notify me of breakage (previously that was done manually.)

That much said, if you see any broken or missing links or know of a resource to suggest, please make use of the Contact Us form. The only request that I make is that due to the forms eccentricity it doesn’t like links that have http://www.somesite.com because it tries to protect me from huge amounts of spam. So, if you have a link to suggest or correct please just substitute the // with xx so it would read http:xxwww.somesite.com – from my testing that makes it past the filter.

I can’t believe my last post here was January! I had tried to keep up with a post a week for my sites for quite a while and managed it, but frankly it’s just too fast a pace with work and everything (and about 10 sites!). So, I won’t be posting as frequently as that in the future. I hope to be putting out a post once a month, but to be honest, it could be every other month, or two or three in a day and then nothing for a month or two. I do try to keep updating the pages behind the scenes so hopefully our resources are getting a bit more complete as time goes by. Hopefully the less ambitious posting will mean that when I have time I will be able to put out better in depth posts and devote more time to the real heart of the site which is our county resource pages.

So, the last few weeks have been quite hectic. To start out with I had a project to work on a web site for a place that does self storage in Greenville, SC and that was closely followed by its sister site that also does self storage in Greenville, SC. I seem to recall several weekends that I worked through with one computer issue after another. including two hard drive replacements over one weekend… then after those projects we started passing a nasty bug around our family and as we recovered, then had to get everything together for our scheduled trip to the beach.

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You may have noticed that we had a 24-36 hour vanishing act. From the information I saw there was an emergency hardware replacement on our server that hosts southcarolinagenealogy.org I think this may have been the longest outage I’ve seen with our host. (Wouldn’t have enjoyed being in the server room for all of that…) Anyway, things seem to be back up and running at this point pretty well. Soon, I will be looking at a major wordpress upgrade here, but hopefully there won’t be much outward changing as I do that.

Thanks for stopping by and may you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

As you may have noticed I’m adding RSS feeds for the county Forums to each County page as posts accumulate there.

So, I’ve added the feed today to the Spartanburg County Genealogy page. There now should be forum feeds on 25 pages including a feed for the statewide forum and an aggregate feed for the entire forum. So…. that means we’ve now got 23 o the counties setup with a forum feed on the page which marks the halfway point!

Update 11/11–
Greenville County Genealogy now has the forum feed (and apparently I had left out forum links there originally – that’s now corrected.

There are few personalities of the American Revolution that have endured in story quite like that of Francis Marion – the swamps of South Carolina are what lead to his nickname the Swamp Fox and many places in South Carolina bear his name even today. A recent news article reminded me yet again of this figure. An interpreter of Francis Marion was to speak at a North Carolina Museum.

In any case… I’ve profiled him once before, but this is decidedly more in depth…

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Just a housekeeping note to mention that I’ve made slight updates to the Oconee and Saluda County pages. Also, I’m going to start putting rss feeds from the respective forums into the county profile pages. So, the Union County page would have an rss feed with the latest posts from the Union county forum. I hope to do the same wiht all the pages evenutally, but currently I’ll just be highlighting the counties that already have forum posts. That should help give the posts a bit more visibility.

Counties that now have the rss feed – Aiken, Barnwell, Berkeley, Chester, Chesterfield, Clarendon, Darlington, Edgefield, Fairfield, Georgetown, Hampton, Kershaw, Laurens, Lee, Marlboro, Orangeburg, Sumter, Union, York and I’ve added the St. Andrews forum to the Charleston County Page.

–update 10/10 —
Also Dillon County has the feed from the Forums. (Also added forum feed and edits for Richland. Edits on Williamsburg County.)