15 July 2011

Cemetery News Feed

Now you can see all the BillionGraves activity from your dashboard. We’ve added an activity monitor and news feed to the BillionGraves website. Once you log in, you’ll see your dashboard, and in the window just below your profile picture is a set of scrolling news items. This window will display new batches of images, recently added cemeteries, new blog posts, and other items of interest.


The activity monitor will make it easier to see when there’s progress in the BillionGraves effort. (When the photo collectors and transcribers are keeping pace with each other, it’s hard to tell that anything’s happening.) It can also help you see when cemeteries and photos are added to areas that pertain to your research.

New batches of photos and cemetery additions may take some time to reach the activity monitor. Cemeteries need to be approved before they show up in searches or in the monitor, and we don’t want to report a batch of photos before the whole collection has been uploaded (otherwise the news feed will be full of announcements of 1–2 photos when a single 498-photo announcement would have done just as well). Even though the new items won’t strictly be in real time, they’ll still be an easy way to keep your fingers on the BillionGraves pulse.