About The Website

Here you will find frequently and maybe not so frequently asked questions about the website. If you have questions about anything on the Friends of Silverbrook Cemetery website, send an email to webmaster@friendsofsilverbrook.org.

Friends of Silverbrook Website is on the Internet Archive

Friends of Silverbrook's website collection on Archive-It

Since February 2021, the Friends of Silverbrook Cemetery is using a trial subscription of Archive-It, a service of the Internet Archive. Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Archive-It service allows organizations to control the timing and detail of what is archived.

By using this service, this website now has a publically accessible backup of every page. If this site were to go off-line for any reason, the many hours spent updating our more than 7,000 obituaries will not have been wasted.

Any article can be found by searching on our Sitemap link at Archive-It. Choose the latest date to get the most complete list of obituaries and news.

While our subscription is active (through February 2022), the latest news and obituaries will be added to the collection through weekly scheduled crawls.

Wayback Machine

Periodically, Archive-It promotes a collection to their other service, the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine is a crawl service that attempts to capture every website on the internet for all time. However the Wayback Machine crawl does not go deep in collecting every page. It collects the front page of the website, and pages that are linked closely to the front page. But now that every page of this website has been collected in Archive-It, at least one copy of every obituary will find its way to the Wayback Machine.

One of features of the Wayback Machine is you can see what a website looks like back in time. Here are some interesting links in the Wayback Machine for this website.

First capture of Friends of Silverbrook Website in 2008
Our first redesign in 2008
Our next redesign in 2009
Our redeisgn in 2014
First capture in 2020, which looks similar to today's website

Again, the Sitemap link at the bottom of those last captures is where you can find any article if it has been saved.

After our subscription to Archive-It expires, the Wayback Machine will be where you can find this website forever!

Where did the photos go?

Update 11/5/2019

All the photos that were pointing to Picasaweb, Google Plus and Google Photos have now been relinked to copies and better ones on Flickr. In the process some ugly ones were dropped and some duplicates removed. Any new photos you send to us at photos@friendsofsilverbrook.org will be posted to Flickr as well.

Thank you in advance!

----------

Update 6/5/2019

We've successfully moved the photos to their new home on Flickr. There are about 12,000 grave listings that will need to be relinked to these manually. The backend programs have been converted to search the new repository. The Photo Search drop down under the Photos tab in the toolbar will let you search the photo albums.

In this process, we will prune some of the uglier pics. It's obvious many need to be reshot. If you have an interest in photography and would like to help us out, please send your snapshots to photos@friendsofsilverbrook.org. It helps if the files you send are named LastName,FirstName.jpg.

Thanks!

--Bob.

----------

4/15/2019

Like all best laid plans, it pays to have one more plan "B."

Several years ago, we moved from a stand-alone photo repository to Picasaweb by Google because it was easy to use, had a lot of capacity, and it was free. We still have some old photos on their readonly website, get.google.com. But we can't add any more there.

When Google decided to shut down that service, we moved to Google Plus. There was a lot of work to convert our software to point to that service. We spent a lot of volunteer hours to support that website. It was great while it lasted.

Then we got a notice that our photos were copied to Google Photos--but in an entirely different format. We just didn't have the time or the energy to do that conversion excersie again.

As of April 1, 2019, Google shut down Google Plus. All of our links to Google Plus now have an ugly error message that you can see here www.plus.google.com. We've changed the display code to hide the photo icon if a photo points to Google Plus.

We did save all the photos and their descriptions. It will take us a while to upload them some place a bit more stable. We've been disappointed by Google twice on this and don't want to work with them a third time.

We appreciate your patience on this.

Bob Nightingale, webmaster

What's up with the Website?

Bright, isn't it?

After five years of the old template, it was time spruce up the place. The older software was coming to the end of its security patching December 2014. This new template Alasse by Joomlashack gives us a lot more options and will let us grow the website in coming years.

We were able to migrate all the content from the old site. Most of the menu items are the same as before, but in slightly different places. The layouts change with the size of your browser so you will be able to see this website easier on a tablet or smartphone. The printing is also larger. On big screens there is less wasted space.

If you see something that doesn't look right, just send me an email.

Bob Nightingale, webmaster@friendsofsilverbrook.org

What software is used at this website?

The Friends of Silverbrook Cemetery website uses the Joomla content management system (CMS). The Joomla software manages the obituaries, news articles, and the menus. The template used throughout the system is JS Alasse, available at JoomlaShack.

The photos are managed with a web-based system, Flickr.

The Grave Search and Photo Search are custom-written applications by the webmaster. They use the PHP language, XML calls and the MySQL database.

Some of the reports were designed with an open-source application builder called Fabrik, including the Grave Search.

The host service is JustHost. JustHost provides the Linux server, Apache web server, MySQL database, Joomla and other utilties.

www.friendsofsilverbrook.org has been in operation since May 2007.

If you would like a website just like this one, contact Bob for a quote at webmaster@friendsofsilverbrook.org.

Why are the dates in Year-Month-Day order in Grave Search?

The dates are displayed in the Grave Search in a Year-Month-Day (YYYY-MM-DD) format. This makes it easy to sort by date if the date is treated like a string of characters.

When we have just Year and Month, but no Day, the Day is represented by "00". If we have Year only, the Month and Day are represented by zeroes. Unknown dates are shown as "0000-00-00". The side effect of this standard is that unknown Month and Day will be sorted before January 1 of that year.

We admit there were mistakes made in transcription and importing the records, which we are trying to correct by researching obituaries, tombstones and other records. If you see any errors, please write us at searchedits@friendsofsilverbrook.org.