The brains behind RootsChat?

[piedstilt]

Hi all,

I discovered RootsChat only recently - and I'm loving it! Congratulations on a great web site.

Given that curiosity is an essential - the essential - characteristic of anyone hunting out their roots/family history, maybe you'll forgive this question.

Who are the clever people whose brainchild this site is?

Any chance of a group/company profile?

Second question/suggestion.

This is probably easy for a technically incompetent person like me to suggest (and no doubt hugely difficult for the people who have to actually DO stuff), but in the relatively short time I have been scanning these pages I have encountered hundreds of interesting names and stories and I wondered if there was a way of producing something like an index of names introduced on this site?

I know you have an internal search facility, but my idea was that perhaps such a resource could be more easily 'found' by search engines such as Google.

For instance, as an experiment I googled a relatively unusual name I had just read about on this site. Even with the addition of the word 'family', this still produced several pages of results and RootsChat didn't feature in the first three pages. (I got bored with the idea after that.)

I have only a vague idea about how search engines work but feel that if such a list were sufficiently well tagged, so that it achieved prominence in genealogical-type searches, then it would expand the usefulness of the site, both in terms of people searching within the site and attracting new users from outside.

Oh, do tell me if I am talking technological rubbish ...

Keep up the great work!

Ros     

[bearkat]

I asked a similar question a while back.
If you enter
inurl:www.rootschat.com smith
in google search box
you will find all the smith entries in rootschat.  Just change the surname to the name you want to search for.

[Lloydy]

Hi,

The people behind the Rootschat website are Trystan and Sarah!

Have a look at this, which tells you all about them  http://www.rootschat.com/forum/aboutus.php


Jan

[piedstilt]

Thanks for that Jan.

Now I know!

Ros

[Berlin-Bob]

Hi Ros,

[...]and I wondered if there was a way of producing something like an index of names introduced on this site?

I am not sure if this is exactly what you mean, and at the moment it's still a bit "hidden" but we will soon be going "public" with the Surname Interests Table

http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php/topic,42493.msg166706.html#msg166706

So,  NO, you are not "talking technical rubbish"   

Bob

[piedstilt]

Thanks Bob. Looked the table up - and added a few names. I notice some have had problems but it worked perfectly for me.

Is the idea that this will be picked up by search engines?

Ros

[Berlin-Bob]

It started out with RootsChatters saying it would be nice to have a table of names, so they could quickly find others with the same name interests.

Whether Google and other search engines will pick it up I don't know,

BUT:  we have a tie-in with Google and it automatically chooses the adverts you see at the top of the page.

Judging by what is showing there now on the Surname Interests Table, we might be attracting the wrong people here (or the right people, depending on your point of view).

So if a tall, dark, handsome stranger speaks to you and says "I found you on Google", well, you know best how you wish to react to that

[sarah]

Hi Ros,

There are so many brains behind RootsChat...we are a big communtiy!

Bob I did pick up on your "tall. dark, handsome stranger...........

Sarah