Sommerer Family Website

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[Sommerer] Family Mailing List

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As most of you know by now, we started a Sommerer Family Mailing List a few weeks ago. For those of you not familiar with a mailing list (sometimes called a listserv). It provides a single email address, in our case: family@sommererfamily.com, and email sent to that address is passed on to everyone on the list.

Only people who are members of the list (our family) can see who is on the list, and only members of the list (our family) can send email to family@sommererfamily.com. Any email that is sent in is first “held for moderation” to make sure that it is something that we should be sending on through the mailing list.

Our intention is to send a once a week summary of things that have been posted to the website, and any news/announcements that anyone else wants to send in. We won’t be passing on anything that is a FWD intended for the general public –just family stuff. We’re still trying to increase awareness and participation in the family website, so we might pass non-urgent (and non-confidential) news on as a blurb on the list with a link to a post on the website.

We went ahead and added everyone’s email address to the list. That’s really not the right way to go about this sort of thing. We should have sent out an announcement about the list and let you decide for yourself if you wanted to subscribe to it. But you’re family, so we didn’t bother. What we didn’t do is include anyone’s college kids (or kids in general) in the list. If you would like them to receive updates, please send in their email address.

Having said that, you are welcome to unsubscribe or change your email address or manage your account in any way you choose at this address. That link is also available under the “tools” menu at the top of the page. You will also get an email message once a month reminding you that you’re on the list and how to make any changes.

Time Line

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Another interesting and potentially even useful tool on the website is the time line. It’s a neat little program that allows you to easily scroll through historical events.

We don’t have a lot of information in the time line yet, so don’t think that we’re intentionally leaving anything out. If it’s not there, chances are that we either don’t know the right dates, or we just haven’t gotten to it yet. We’d like to get everyone’s birthday, anniversary and so forth added to the time line.

There's more on the time line now. This is an old picture.

Instead of password protecting the whole time line, mom said that it would be okay if we didn’t display the birthdays of people who are still alive. So everyone can see some of the information on the time line, but you have to be logged in to see current birthdays.  If you’d like to see all of the information, you have to log-in to the site.

If you don’t have a username, you can get one by clicking the Register button that is near the bottom of the Sidebar on the right hand side of the screen. You’ll have to answer some questions, and undergo a though background check (we don’t want to let in any rift-raft unless they are family), and wait until someone can look it over.

This is what it looks like

I’m sure you’ll find that some  information is missing from the time line. You can use the form under the time line send in that information. In fact, you might want to check your own information once you have a username just to make sure it is correct.

Calendar

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Did you notice that there are a handful of useful pages located under the tools menu at the top of the website?  You should check them out. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Okay, did you find the calendar? It’s pretty cool.  We’re not putting birth years on it, so mom said that we didn’t have to password protect it. I don’t know why she doesn’t want people to know how old she is.

This is from the first day that we tried to put things on the calendar.

We have all of the birthdays that we have on the calendar, so if one is missing, let us know. We don’t have very many anniversaries yet. You should add yours to the comments below and I’ll put it in the calendar. RIght now I think Lauren’s is the only one on it.

I’m sure you’ll find that some of the information in the calendar is missing or wrong. When you find something that needs to be changed, you can use the form below the calendar to send in the updated information. In fact, you might want to check your families information to make sure it is correct.

Popup Glossary

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If you’ve been reading for a while, you know that there are a few somewhat interesting pages available from the tools menu at the top of the website. The Popup Glossary isn’t one of them. This page is part of the tool that creates the cute mouse-overs whenever we type a name ( like Brittney Rowland ) in a post. I really like that feature, because it lets me know who some of the younger members of our family belong to.

See? Pretty worthless as a page.

Unfortunately, to have the feature, you also have to have the page. So I threw it in with the other tools, even though it’s pretty worthless by itself.  As with the other tools, you’ll have to register and login before you can see it.

This is what it looks like

This is probably a good place to point out that, for simplicity, parental information always lists a single parental decedent from Adolph and Theresa. This is not the most accurate possible way to list people (in fact, it’s pretty darn inaccurate), but it is the most straight forward. Every other consistent way that we thought of to list people was quite complex. Anyway, this is just meant to give you an idea of where people fit in. It’s not meant to be a genealogy listing.

Complaint Box

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Is there anything here that is not working for you? Is there anything that needs to be changed? Do you have any suggestions? Are we posting too much stuff with new things every weekday? Are we posting too little stuff? Do you have trouble commenting?

What do you think?

Family Members

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The family members list is a little tool that I wanted, so that I could look and see how everyone is related. You’d think I would just know this stuff by now, but I don’t.  You’ll find the family members list and a bunch of other occationally useful items in the tools menu at the top of the website.

The cool feature about the family members list is that if you click on the little [+] sign next to each family, it will expand to show you the next level. You can keep digging down as far as there are kids to find. If you just tried to look at it just now, you probably realized that it is password protected. You have to log-in to the site before you can view it. We did that because my mom said that you might not want the whole world to know your mother’s maiden name, and you have to listen to your mom.

Expand away...

If you don’t have a username, you can get one by clicking the Register button that is near the bottom of the Sidebar on the right hand side of the screen. You’ll have to answer some questions, and undergo a though background check (we don’t want to let in any rift-raft unless they are family), and wait until someone can look it over.

This is what it looks like

We think the information in the family members list is pretty up-to-date, but you guys keep having babies, so, when you find something that needs to be changed, you can use the form below the list to send in the updated information. In fact, you might want to check your families information once you have a username just to make sure it is correct.

Coincidentally, my parents came up to our house this last weekend for the Nebraska Sommerer Family Picnic, and Dad (Uncle Lloyd) told them that he would list out everyone in his family for them. He was glad to find it already done when he got here.