FamilyCrossings Blog | Page 3 of 11 | Private Family Websites -Because Your Family Matters

A Unified Approach to Family Scheduling -Using an Online Calendar

I was listening to a podcast yesterday while out walking the dog and the subject was keeping track of the children.The ‘caster was complaining that it was almost impossible to deliver and pickup their 3 children from after-schoool activities. He went on to say that both he and his wife have showed up in different cars at the same time to pick up a daughter from dance class. The family had resorted to a dry erase board that each family member was responsible for maintaining. The 5 dry-erase boards took up an entire wall in their kitchen. Of course this solution did not work very well since 5 dry erase boards are not portable and are impossible to update remotely.

So I wrote the podcaster a personal email explaining that the Familycrossings.com family calendar is the perfect solution. Everybody can enter their own events (including weekly recurring events), assign category colors, send email notifications, reminders and text alerts to themselves and the parent who is supposed to pick them up. Family members can remotely login from their cell phones. Familycrossings Monthly Calendars also can be printed out and replace the dry erase boards in the kitchen.

You can sign up for a free, standard or premium account by clicking here.
To read more about our family calendar function click here.
You can see an example of a Dance Class event by checking our Twitter feed.

Family Crossings Update

For the hundreds of MyFamily clients who converted to Familycrossings.com your wait is over. We listened to your feedback and have delivered a new Family friendlyfeature.

Located in the “What’s New” area the link named “New to Me” will bring you every photo, every story, every comment that you have not clicked on. The site will start by bringing you the last 30 days of content and then will start removing from this page the items you clicked. There is a “dismiss” function if you wish to delete from “New to Me” all the content by area or by each item.

An update to our navigation will be coming soon.

Member Bytes

This morning we uploaded a new feature to Familycrosings.com called Member Bytes. It is an alternative to the Home Page and What’s New.

Member Bytes shows ALL the content and comments added by each Family Member and can be sorted by “Most Recent”, “Member’s Name”, or “Content Score”. Content score references the amount of content and comments that each Family Member has added.

Check it out the next time you log in.

MyFamily Alternative Making Subscribers Smile

Familycrossings.com new FTP function makes uploading the MyFamily photos fast and efficient since when the zip file is unpacked all the MYFamily photos are rendered into new galleries. As an alternative to starting over creating a family member directory you can create a .csv of first name, last name, email address and send everyone in the family new invitations to Familycrossings. Using these two tools will save hours while you are creating your alternative to MyFamily.com

MyFamily.com Final Answer from Ancestry.com

On June 25, 2014 Familycrossings received the email below from Ancestry.com regarding our requests that they step up and provide additional support for the subscribers of MyFamily. Our development team has worked quickly to provide you with a way of importing your members and adding your photos. Both tools work perfectly however we will not be able to provide any further tools to make for a better transition because of Ancestry.com’s response.

Click the image below to read the actual email.

Familycrossings.com will continue to assist Myfamily.com subscribers in transitioning to our family web site product.

Transfer Photos From MyFamily Via FTP is Now Available

MyFamily.com members who already have zip archives containing photos can begin uploading them via FTP. The process will be at least 6 times faster than http based uploads. We have also made it easier rotate and add titles, descriptions and tags to your family photos as you review each new gallery.

Save time and read the instructions before you start. Check this space for webinar times for the Week June 23 to June 29, 2014.

BTW As of 6/22/2014 the status of MyFamily.com is not available. (Day 5). We will let you know by tweet @familycrossings and this blog when we have more info about MyFamily.com.

Transfer Files From MyFamily to Familycrossings Ready

MyFamily is providing web site subscribers with a zipped archive that contains photos organized in folders. There are no comments, titles, or descriptions. Starting June 20, 2014 subscribers who enter the “myfamily” promo code will get access to a special tool to transfer those files. Subscribers will need to use FTP to upload the MyFamily zipped archives. These files from MyFamily can be as big a 1.5 GB each. Once uploaded to your family site the administrator can click a link to start unpacking your archive. We suggest that you return the next day to sort through all the Galleries. Editing Galleries and Photos navigation are located on the left menu.

If you used the “myfamily” promo code when you signed up you will automatically get an email when the transfer file tool is ready for you to start using on your family website.

MyFamily.com and Ancestry.com Updates and Transition to Familycrossings

Familycrossings.com has attempted to speak with informed individuals at Ancestry about the subscriber problems. No phone calls have been returned. An email replied from Eric included the following:
“We apologize for any confusion.
Currently we the exporting tool is only able to export the site photos. We have taken feedback about expanding our export options. If we are able to expand the export tool we will send out an update email.”

The exported archives that we have seen from subscriber do indeed include photos and folders, unfortunately there are only a few photos and folders in an archive. However these subscribers believe that there are 1000s of photos and are very disappointed with the export function.

I believe that the script that MyFamily / Ancestry is using is broken. They may not know it, but we can’t tell them if they don’t call back.

On the positive side of the transition we have installed a script in our Administration area that will import a text file to add multiple users at once. The HELP files inside your Familycrossings website covers the details of “how to” to do this. It is very simple.

The web development team is also working on the FTP function that will allow Administrators to auto recreate folders and photo inside our Gallery system. We hope to have it finished by the end of this weekend. Unfortunately you will still need to add photo titles, description, keywords, and location info manually.

We will be scheduling webinars for MyFamily administrators next week to help with learning the Familycrossings functionality.

More info about MyFamily.com ending service

Yes it is true Myfamily.com has ended taking new subscription to its service and will close its doors in September of 2014. Familycrossings has requested samples of “export” sample files. This will allow us help you migrate from Myfamily.com to our family website service.

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