A big area where I think our website will be able to act as both a historical record as well as just a bit of craic would be an area on Reminisciences.
As part of my work with the Rehab Mayo People of the Year Awards, I had the privelage this year of meeting a number of current and recent residents of Birmingham, UK (all with ties to Mayo). They were all distinguished gentlemen with long, prestigious careers. But, the thing that really stood out to me was their strong gra for Ireland and Mayo and their participation in events and fundraising over the years on behalf of various groups and causes. Most importantly--they have amazing stories to tell!
I think anyone would enjoy hearing about some of these exploits--especially if you know some of the people involved.
So, we'll definitely encourage people to share some of their own stories as well as their "as told by" stories.
The only suggestion I'd make for things to avoid would be any story that starts with something like: you youngsters just don't understand how easy you have it...in my day we used to walk/cycle/whatever for miles/hours/days just to... Those kinds of stories start to sound a bit like whinging...so they'll have their own place somewhere in the forums.
Saying that, I have heard some amazing tales about how people used to walk their cattle from Foxford to Castlebar for the mart. Or, cycling fairly long distances to dances and the like. Which is worth remembering in our day of good roads and cars.
Or am I just starting to sound like the whingers?
If you have any great stories from Mayo or involving Mayo people abroad or other suggestions for content and information for our new website, please email me at webmaster@mayococo.ie.
As always, please email me your comments and ideas to webmaster@mayococo.ie and please join our Mayo Worldwide Community Facebook group.
Thanks for reading!
Friday, November 19, 2010
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Content: Keeping it Fun - Ghost Story II--the Foxford Man on the Road
I'd like to share a few more Mayo ghost stories before I move on to some other topics...
One of the side roads near the railway station in Foxford is said to have been haunted (sorry for the vagueness...I'm sure someone else can give the road's name). Years ago, men were supposed to have been scared to have walked or cycled home down this road after a night in the pub or at a dance.
According to several in the area, anyone walking down this road late at night would suddenly find a friendly looking man walking alongside them. The man would follow them for quite a distance down the road, perfectly matching their pace.
Some accounts have the stranger chatting amiably with the unfortunate walker. In others, the man is said to be forlorn and silent.
In all cases, as soon as the fellow-travellers came to a certain place on the road, the man simply disappeared.
This apparently went on for years with people walking literally miles to avoid this stretch of road.
One account has it that a priest blessed the road and that the man wasn't seen since. But, I've heard from others that he's still there and still sighted on lonely nights, but that most people don't notice him as they speed by in their cars.
If you have any ghost stories from Mayo or other suggestions for content and information for our new website, please email me at webmaster@mayococo.ie.
As always, please email me your comments and ideas to webmaster@mayococo.ie and please join our Mayo Worldwide Community Facebook group.
Thanks for reading!
Rick Love
One of the side roads near the railway station in Foxford is said to have been haunted (sorry for the vagueness...I'm sure someone else can give the road's name). Years ago, men were supposed to have been scared to have walked or cycled home down this road after a night in the pub or at a dance.
According to several in the area, anyone walking down this road late at night would suddenly find a friendly looking man walking alongside them. The man would follow them for quite a distance down the road, perfectly matching their pace.
Some accounts have the stranger chatting amiably with the unfortunate walker. In others, the man is said to be forlorn and silent.
In all cases, as soon as the fellow-travellers came to a certain place on the road, the man simply disappeared.
This apparently went on for years with people walking literally miles to avoid this stretch of road.
One account has it that a priest blessed the road and that the man wasn't seen since. But, I've heard from others that he's still there and still sighted on lonely nights, but that most people don't notice him as they speed by in their cars.
If you have any ghost stories from Mayo or other suggestions for content and information for our new website, please email me at webmaster@mayococo.ie.
As always, please email me your comments and ideas to webmaster@mayococo.ie and please join our Mayo Worldwide Community Facebook group.
Thanks for reading!
Rick Love
Monday, November 15, 2010
Content: Keeping it Fun - Foxford Green House Ghost Story
This post will be a bit of a departure from the posts so far. To date, I've tried to give ye a flavour of what we're planning for our new website. But, the key to any website is the content.
We want the site to be fun as well as useful. So, one section I'm pushing for will be a sort of myths and folklore section where we can include some of the local stories and legends. I'd also like to include a reminiscience section where people can share stories and anecdotes from today or going back the years.
So, in that vein, here is my own contribution to the Ghost story section.
Variations of this story have been told to me by a number of people living in and around Foxford, County Mayo.
On the road into Foxford (coming from Straid) is a good sized green house on the left side of the road.
Supposedly, this house was built for a young couple who moved in after their wedding. But, on thier first night in the new house, they were tormented by a strange noises, flashing lights and items moving around the room. The couple fled, deserting the house entirely.
Several years later, a group of English fishermen came to Foxford and found the local hotel full. Someone in the pub suggested they kip in the abandoned house. Although warned of the ghosts, the men thought nothing of it and camped in the house. Before morning, they took to the roads and left Foxford, skipping the rest of their angling holiday.
So, why is it haunted?
The story I've heard is that either the house was built on part of a road used by people during the famine who were leaving the area on their way to emigrate or that where the house was built was on top of a field where cattle that was seized during the famine years from families unable to pay their debts was held before being sold on. Either way, the field is said to have a bad karma about it...
We want the site to be fun as well as useful. So, one section I'm pushing for will be a sort of myths and folklore section where we can include some of the local stories and legends. I'd also like to include a reminiscience section where people can share stories and anecdotes from today or going back the years.
So, in that vein, here is my own contribution to the Ghost story section.
Variations of this story have been told to me by a number of people living in and around Foxford, County Mayo.
On the road into Foxford (coming from Straid) is a good sized green house on the left side of the road.
Supposedly, this house was built for a young couple who moved in after their wedding. But, on thier first night in the new house, they were tormented by a strange noises, flashing lights and items moving around the room. The couple fled, deserting the house entirely.
Several years later, a group of English fishermen came to Foxford and found the local hotel full. Someone in the pub suggested they kip in the abandoned house. Although warned of the ghosts, the men thought nothing of it and camped in the house. Before morning, they took to the roads and left Foxford, skipping the rest of their angling holiday.
So, why is it haunted?
The story I've heard is that either the house was built on part of a road used by people during the famine who were leaving the area on their way to emigrate or that where the house was built was on top of a field where cattle that was seized during the famine years from families unable to pay their debts was held before being sold on. Either way, the field is said to have a bad karma about it...
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
White smoke on our technology...
If you're not a bit of an IT nerd, please look away now.
Ok, now that only the IT crowd is left...
We decided yesterday on which platform to use for our project. In the end, we decided to go for the Dot Net Nuke, ASP.NET/MS SQL based platform with a Wiki and Social Networking plug-in.
We like the plug-and-play nature of the modules, the security model and the degree of open-source freedom that goes with the product (the standard edition and many modules are free and open source). The team also felt that since our skill set was predominently .NET that it made the most sense to stay with this technology.
But, until today, this was not a foregone conclusion.
We began our product search by looking at virtually every platform that came up after a number of detailed searches on the web and a number of product comparisons could find (Wikipedia has some great comparisons).
Some of the products we looked at in detail were:
The runner-up solution was BoonEx Dolphin. This is simply a fantastic, psuedo-open source product. It looks amazing out-of-the-box and is pretty friendly for users. Our concern was that it appeared to be somewhat difficult to build custom modules for. We were also put off a bit by the fact that the demo site looks much better than any of the live sites actually using the software. Usually, it's the other way around.
I was very impressed by the DotNetDating software which is proprietary, but very reasonably priced. The team's only concern was that it might be an as-is product. Since it appears to be from a smallish company, we were worried that there might not be guaranteed future versions leaving us obsolete at some point in the future. But, functionality was great for the price! Chameleon was a similar solution (but the demo site's look & feel is very off-putting...great functionality if you can get past that).
MonoX appears to be a product more widely in use. But, we couldn't locate any additional plug-in modules apart from the core product. Still, it looks great and we were very impressed by the price.
My personal favourite proprietary was Planet Web Foot. This is a company that custom-develops social networking solutions and several of their portfolio sites are really amazing. We weren't looking to outsource our development, but this was the only reason they were taken out of the running.
BuddyPress and Elgg were also two we liked a lot. Basically, these are systems where you add in as many plug-ins as you need to get the functionality you want. Both are open-source and have massive user/developer communities. Our only concern was that the plug-ins for both typically required over-writing some of the functionality of other plug-ins. We were scared that if you built your solution in the wrong order, you could actually end up with a buggy solution. For example, if you added modules A, B and C and then module D overwrites part of modules A and B...and then when you go to add module E, IT wants to overwrite module B, will module B still work with module D?
For smaller sites with less complexity, I would definitley use Elgg and think seriously about Buddy Press (Buddy Press is VERY easy to use and is based on WordPress which most people pick up in minutes).
The other two solutions were proprietary and mostly ruled out for cost reasons. We actually never got a reply to repeated emails to one company--so we STILL don't know the cost. You know the rule: if the sales team won't respond to you, what hope do you have with support afterwards?
As always, please email me your comments and ideas to webmaster@mayococo.ie and please join our Mayo Worldwide Community Facebook group.
Thanks for reading!
Rick Love
Ok, now that only the IT crowd is left...
We decided yesterday on which platform to use for our project. In the end, we decided to go for the Dot Net Nuke, ASP.NET/MS SQL based platform with a Wiki and Social Networking plug-in.
We like the plug-and-play nature of the modules, the security model and the degree of open-source freedom that goes with the product (the standard edition and many modules are free and open source). The team also felt that since our skill set was predominently .NET that it made the most sense to stay with this technology.
But, until today, this was not a foregone conclusion.
We began our product search by looking at virtually every platform that came up after a number of detailed searches on the web and a number of product comparisons could find (Wikipedia has some great comparisons).
Some of the products we looked at in detail were:
- DotNetDating (note: most social networking software is the same as dating software--but uses slightly different terminology for its "matching"/friend finding)
- PlanetWebFoot
- Chameleon
- Elgg
- Dot Net Nuke
- Buddy Press (based on Word Press)
- BoonEx Dolphin
- Leverage
- Communifire
- MonoX
The runner-up solution was BoonEx Dolphin. This is simply a fantastic, psuedo-open source product. It looks amazing out-of-the-box and is pretty friendly for users. Our concern was that it appeared to be somewhat difficult to build custom modules for. We were also put off a bit by the fact that the demo site looks much better than any of the live sites actually using the software. Usually, it's the other way around.
I was very impressed by the DotNetDating software which is proprietary, but very reasonably priced. The team's only concern was that it might be an as-is product. Since it appears to be from a smallish company, we were worried that there might not be guaranteed future versions leaving us obsolete at some point in the future. But, functionality was great for the price! Chameleon was a similar solution (but the demo site's look & feel is very off-putting...great functionality if you can get past that).
MonoX appears to be a product more widely in use. But, we couldn't locate any additional plug-in modules apart from the core product. Still, it looks great and we were very impressed by the price.
My personal favourite proprietary was Planet Web Foot. This is a company that custom-develops social networking solutions and several of their portfolio sites are really amazing. We weren't looking to outsource our development, but this was the only reason they were taken out of the running.
BuddyPress and Elgg were also two we liked a lot. Basically, these are systems where you add in as many plug-ins as you need to get the functionality you want. Both are open-source and have massive user/developer communities. Our only concern was that the plug-ins for both typically required over-writing some of the functionality of other plug-ins. We were scared that if you built your solution in the wrong order, you could actually end up with a buggy solution. For example, if you added modules A, B and C and then module D overwrites part of modules A and B...and then when you go to add module E, IT wants to overwrite module B, will module B still work with module D?
For smaller sites with less complexity, I would definitley use Elgg and think seriously about Buddy Press (Buddy Press is VERY easy to use and is based on WordPress which most people pick up in minutes).
The other two solutions were proprietary and mostly ruled out for cost reasons. We actually never got a reply to repeated emails to one company--so we STILL don't know the cost. You know the rule: if the sales team won't respond to you, what hope do you have with support afterwards?
As always, please email me your comments and ideas to webmaster@mayococo.ie and please join our Mayo Worldwide Community Facebook group.
Thanks for reading!
Rick Love
Friday, November 5, 2010
A Family Tree for Mayo?
Something that's recently come on our radar for the project is the idea of having a family tree for people living in or related to people from County Mayo, Ireland.
The basic idea would be that every member of our new website could add their parents and spouses to the "County Family Tree" and, if someone has added a relation, they could connect to them. This would really take off if we can use some of the standard formats so people can easily upload and download their family trees.
If the effort was successful, you'd imaging people would begin to see their trees tie together pretty quickly. If you've never done geneaology before, it hits you pretty quickly how each generation back doubles your number of known ancestors (2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents...). Since most people would know their parents and grandparents, the trees should begin connecting pretty quickly.
I personally like the idea of doing this as it actually shows how "we're all related." The downside is that you quickly discover that your ancestors can be both heroes and villians...so it may not be a pursuit for the feint hearted!
If anyone can recommend a web-based programme that does this especially well, please pass on your suggestion to me. The complexity of doing this may mean that it won't be available for launch day in 2011, but I'd like to try and get something up like this fairly quickly.
Another option would be to partner with a company already doing this. This is something I will need to investigate further as I'm not actively doing any family history research myself (and unfortunately, neither are any of my immediate Team on this project). So, much for us to learn.
As always, please pass on any comments to me at webmaster@mayococo.ie and please join our Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_125453407511270
More Soon!
Rick Love
The basic idea would be that every member of our new website could add their parents and spouses to the "County Family Tree" and, if someone has added a relation, they could connect to them. This would really take off if we can use some of the standard formats so people can easily upload and download their family trees.
If the effort was successful, you'd imaging people would begin to see their trees tie together pretty quickly. If you've never done geneaology before, it hits you pretty quickly how each generation back doubles your number of known ancestors (2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents...). Since most people would know their parents and grandparents, the trees should begin connecting pretty quickly.
I personally like the idea of doing this as it actually shows how "we're all related." The downside is that you quickly discover that your ancestors can be both heroes and villians...so it may not be a pursuit for the feint hearted!
If anyone can recommend a web-based programme that does this especially well, please pass on your suggestion to me. The complexity of doing this may mean that it won't be available for launch day in 2011, but I'd like to try and get something up like this fairly quickly.
Another option would be to partner with a company already doing this. This is something I will need to investigate further as I'm not actively doing any family history research myself (and unfortunately, neither are any of my immediate Team on this project). So, much for us to learn.
As always, please pass on any comments to me at webmaster@mayococo.ie and please join our Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_125453407511270
More Soon!
Rick Love
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Not Reinventing the Wheel...
We're still in the early stages of our project to build a website to help the Worldwide Community of people with an interest in Mayo together...
But, one of the things we keep coming back to in our design discussions is what kind of a website do we want to create that will be the most useful to the most number of people?
We identified about a dozen groups of people ("audiences") that we would like to have using our website. Without boring everyone to death...they essentially come down to:
In addition, we've decided to have most of the site content in Wiki format. Basically, our idea is to create pages for all of the towns and villages of Mayo and work with local community members to try and put up information about all of these areas. Since it will be a Wiki, anyone with information will be able to add what they know to it.
Over time, we'd hope to develop an extensive living encyclopedia about all things Mayo. Personally, I'm hoping that the site members keep a real spirit of fun to the listing. I think it would be great to have things such as ghost stories, local legends and folklore and the like included as well as what you'd expect to see such as information about favourite sons and daughters like Michael Davitt.
As the title of this post says, "Not Reinventing the Wheel" is our goal. There's no point in putting up a bit of information on a topic that is much better dealt with on a specialist website elsewhere. But, we do want to be as useful to as many people as possible.
Some ideas we'd like to explore deeper are: genealogy (could we have a county-wide "family tree" shared by everyone?), area pages that combine information for Irish communities in places such as Cleveland, Ohio, USA with news and events from County Mayo and shopping (how can we best sell or help market Mayo products worldwide?)...
As always, please email me your comments and ideas to webmaster@mayococo.ie and please join our Mayo Worldwide Community Facebook group.
Thanks for reading!
Rick Love
But, one of the things we keep coming back to in our design discussions is what kind of a website do we want to create that will be the most useful to the most number of people?
We identified about a dozen groups of people ("audiences") that we would like to have using our website. Without boring everyone to death...they essentially come down to:
- People living in Mayo
- People interested in keeping up with what's happening in Mayo, but living outside the county
- People who may want to visit Mayo (as general visitors or who have special interests like walking, kayaking, surfing, etc.)
- People whose ancestors came from Mayo
In addition, we've decided to have most of the site content in Wiki format. Basically, our idea is to create pages for all of the towns and villages of Mayo and work with local community members to try and put up information about all of these areas. Since it will be a Wiki, anyone with information will be able to add what they know to it.
Over time, we'd hope to develop an extensive living encyclopedia about all things Mayo. Personally, I'm hoping that the site members keep a real spirit of fun to the listing. I think it would be great to have things such as ghost stories, local legends and folklore and the like included as well as what you'd expect to see such as information about favourite sons and daughters like Michael Davitt.
As the title of this post says, "Not Reinventing the Wheel" is our goal. There's no point in putting up a bit of information on a topic that is much better dealt with on a specialist website elsewhere. But, we do want to be as useful to as many people as possible.
Some ideas we'd like to explore deeper are: genealogy (could we have a county-wide "family tree" shared by everyone?), area pages that combine information for Irish communities in places such as Cleveland, Ohio, USA with news and events from County Mayo and shopping (how can we best sell or help market Mayo products worldwide?)...
As always, please email me your comments and ideas to webmaster@mayococo.ie and please join our Mayo Worldwide Community Facebook group.
Thanks for reading!
Rick Love
Monday, November 1, 2010
Connecting the Dots
One thing we're very conscious of with the Mayo Worldwide Community project is the need to include as many people as possible, as much information as possible and as many other websites/projects as possible. The purpose of the website is to add to what is already online--not to replace anything.
So, some of the things we'd like to connect with:
But, it's possible to get even more connectivity between our site and Facebook. For example, we can connect a user's profile on both sites so that when their wall or status is updated on one site, it's updated on both. Several websites already do this and it seems like a handy way for people active on a number of websites to keep them all in sync.
I haven't seen this done on LinkedIn, but I've heard some similar things can be done there.
Most local media in Mayo have RSS feeds. So, we have one way open already of aggregating news stories.
However, what we're hoping to do is to provide website members with news and events filtered both for their locality and Mayo. So, if you were a website member living in Toronto, news and events of interest to you in the Toronto area and in Mayo would be highlighted to you. You could also search for events in other places by date, location or event type (ex. trad music, indie music, historic talk, etc.).
For the site to be useful to business owners, I think people would like a business listing to show businesses with Mayo connections around the world. Ideally, we'd want to build on what exists already. So, it may be possible to do some kind of data sharing between the new Mayo.ie and existing business listing websites so that everyone benefits.
What do you think? Fire on any feedback or ideas you have about our project to me by commenting below or emailing me at webmaster@mayococo.ie.
Also, please join our new Mayo Worldwide Community Group on Facebook to keep up with our project and to be one of the first invited to use it when it goes live.
Rick Love
So, some of the things we'd like to connect with:
- Local news/media outlets
- Global/Regional news outlets
- Other existing communities
- Other business and event listings
But, it's possible to get even more connectivity between our site and Facebook. For example, we can connect a user's profile on both sites so that when their wall or status is updated on one site, it's updated on both. Several websites already do this and it seems like a handy way for people active on a number of websites to keep them all in sync.
I haven't seen this done on LinkedIn, but I've heard some similar things can be done there.
Most local media in Mayo have RSS feeds. So, we have one way open already of aggregating news stories.
However, what we're hoping to do is to provide website members with news and events filtered both for their locality and Mayo. So, if you were a website member living in Toronto, news and events of interest to you in the Toronto area and in Mayo would be highlighted to you. You could also search for events in other places by date, location or event type (ex. trad music, indie music, historic talk, etc.).
For the site to be useful to business owners, I think people would like a business listing to show businesses with Mayo connections around the world. Ideally, we'd want to build on what exists already. So, it may be possible to do some kind of data sharing between the new Mayo.ie and existing business listing websites so that everyone benefits.
What do you think? Fire on any feedback or ideas you have about our project to me by commenting below or emailing me at webmaster@mayococo.ie.
Also, please join our new Mayo Worldwide Community Group on Facebook to keep up with our project and to be one of the first invited to use it when it goes live.
Rick Love
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