Ben Sayer

You can now use your credit card to purchase a GenealogyTools.com membership without having a PayPal account! Click the link to learn more about membership benefits and to join.

You know  how those time consuming housekeeping tasks can pile up on you? Well, over the past few days I’ve cleaned up a big pile. Eliminating this pile cleared up two problems:

1. Over time I’ve tried providing the videos on GenealogyTools a few different ways. This inconsistency has bothered me and I fear may have caused confusion for you.
2. The software I use to record videos has undergone several major updates since I began. The older files needed to be upgraded to the newest formats to avoid losing the ability to work with them in the future.

I’ve re-rendered all of the nearly 200 videos on GenealogyTools.com and edited all the associated articles to make the videos available the same way. A side-effect of this is that I made the videos from the MacGenealogist.com Archives viewable on the site for everyone.

I settled on using the latest web technology, HTML5. This makes the videos viewable on all the major browsers and devices without requiring additional software. The one exception is Firefox on Mac OS X; you’ll need to use Safari or Chrome on Mac OS X.

I hope that my investment of countless hours in cleaning up this pile pays off for you. If nothing else, it enables me to give clear tips like this: to make it easier to see all the details in a video, make it full screen by clicking the control in the bottom right corner of the video.

GenealogyTools.com will be unavailable for 6 to 24 hours beginning Monday, March 30th at 8:00 pm EDT.

This is so I can make a change required to offer memberships using a credit card instead of PayPal.