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Recent Changes

September 5, 2026 (evening)

  • Family member names cleaned up to match the family tree. A batch of person folders and story tags that had drifted from the official family-tree spelling (typos, missing nicknames, old punctuation) were brought back in line, so stories show up correctly on everyone's page. Folders that intentionally use a married name for browsing were left alone.
  • New admin tool: Synchronize Local. Alongside "Deploy to AWS," there's now a "Synchronize Local" button that pulls the site's current stories, proposals, and photos down onto Walt's own computer — the reverse direction of a deploy — so anything added or approved on the live site doesn't get left behind on the next round of local changes.

September 5, 2026 (later)

One more fix:

  • Fixed "Edit this story" opening blank for shared stories. A story that shows up on more than one person's page (like "Sandfiddlers for Walt," which also appears on Frank Herman Scheper's page) could open an empty edit form instead of the story's actual text, if you clicked Edit from a page other than the one the story is really filed under. It now always opens with the real content pre-filled, no matter which page you click Edit from.

September 5, 2026

A big batch of fixes and new features today:

  • Share a story with more than one person. When writing or editing a story, you can now add other family members it should also appear for — search for each person one at a time and add them. It's the same story everywhere it's shared, so an edit updates it for everyone at once.
  • See pending stories on the person's page. A story that's been submitted but not yet reviewed now shows up right on that person's page with a "Pending Approval" label — visible only to whoever wrote it and whoever can review it, no one else. Reviewers can preview and approve it right there.
  • "Pending Stories to Review" alert. Admins now see a highlighted button on the home page whenever there's something waiting for their review, linking straight to the review queue.
  • Nicer link previews. Pasting a link to the site into Facebook, texts, or chat apps now shows a proper title, description, and photo instead of nothing.
  • Fixed quotation marks showing up wrong. A story with quotation marks in it (like "Wolves in the Woods") was displaying the literal text " instead of a real quote mark. Fixed, and the affected story was corrected.
  • Fixed profile photos reverting after a site update. Changing someone's profile photo could get silently undone by the next site update. That's fixed — photo choices now stick.
  • Easier navigation on admin pages. The admin panel, proposal review queue, member list, and log/session viewers all now have a clear, visible way back to the family tree (it was there before, but essentially invisible against the page background).
  • Longer login-session history. Admins can now review up to 14 days of sign-in activity, up from 2.
  • From here on, this page will be kept up to date with every change made to the site, big or small.

August 25, 2026

A few fixes and improvements from today:

  • Fixed blank tree pages for a few people. A handful of family members' tree pages were showing up blank because of a data quirk in the imported family history — a person recorded, by mistake in the old records, as their own ancestor. That's fixed now, and the page loads normally.
  • More accurate birth and death dates. Several records in the imported family history carry more than one date on file — for example, an exact date from one old census alongside a rougher "about" guess from another. The site now keeps the more precise one instead of whichever happened to be read last, so a specific date can't get overwritten by a vague guess.
  • Sign in to your own starting point. A family member's tree view can now be set to open on a specific person right when they sign in, and again whenever they click Reset. If nobody's set one specifically, it automatically opens to their own branch of the family (Dot, Grace, Frank, or Schep) instead of the same default person for everyone.
  • Easier family member management. The admin list of who's allowed to sign in can now be edited directly — no more removing and re-adding someone just to fix an email or update who they're linked to.

August 22–23, 2026

It's been a busy couple of days behind the scenes — here's what changed:

  • Stronger site protection. Added safeguards to help block malicious or automated traffic from reaching the site.
  • Continued security review. Two more items from our ongoing industry-standard security checklist (the OWASP API Top 10) were addressed — a written inventory of every part of the site was published, and a third-party piece used by the story editor was pinned to a specific, reviewed version.
  • One item remaining. A single lower-priority security item is still open and tracked for a future update.
  • Cleaned up legacy software. Removed an old login system and related tools that were replaced by the current sign-in system a while back but never fully removed.
  • Laying groundwork for more editing controls. Started planning support for more advanced story editing and letting trusted family members manage photo removal for their own branch of the family. The first piece — recording each person's email address in our activity history — shipped today.
  • More storage headroom. Expanded the server's disk space after it ran low, so the site has plenty of room to grow.
  • Lower hosting costs. Removed an unused, empty storage volume that was costing money for nothing.