Major progress has been made on the relational database project. As previously reported, this has been a multi-year project that is now essentially complete. See the Spring 2024 Report for more information.

• The existing Microsoft Access database has been converted to SQLite.
• Additonal fields have been added to accomadate any information that has been added since 2012.
• The database mainteance program has been updated to handle the conversion to SQLite and the addition of these fields.
• The web page generation program has been similarly updated.
• The database was updated to reflect any changes that were made to the web pages manually between 2012 and 2017.
• A full set of web pages was generated from the updated database. Each of those pages were compared to the existing web pages to verify the accuracy of the update process.
• The templates for the generated web pages have been updated to reflect modern HTML standards.

The next major project is to provide links to Find A Grave™. As might be expected, the relational database project was a prerequisite for this project. Ideally each NHOGA graveyard would be linked to the corresponding site of Find A Grave. In practice a one-to-one mapping is not possible. However the majority of sites can be mapped. Fields have been added to the database to support this goal and the database mainteance program and the web page generation program both support this functionality. A few sites have been manually updated to test the generated links.

Although Find A Grave links can be maintained manually, such an effort would be very time consuming and error-prone. I have designed an algorithm that can partially automate the process. Implemetation of the algorithm is still pending.

Routine maintenance of the website is an ongoing process. However manual maintenance of the data pages and index pages has now been eliminated. Maintaining the relational database is considerably easier than manually editing HTML.

Clark Bagnall
Webmaster