Tracking genealogical information and other stuff -- a CMS solution

I have a large collection of information I’d like to track. With an interest in photography, history, and family history there are plenty of things for me to track, a large cache of physical items and computer files.

I keep adding and removing software tools from the mix to help with this never ending goal.

After working on a web site to track family history and genealogical relationships using Drupal (a content management system) I began to expand the focus of what it could track. In some cases I would not mind some of my data being Internet facing. However, most of the items and information I would not want the risk of Internet exposure.

I liked the simplicity and flexibility of web-based content management systems (CMS) over the many desktop applications I had been using. Without creating a home server I simply elected to install Microsoft’s WebMatrix. Selecting the development environments I wanted to create, I installed Drupal, WordPress and ASP.NET development environments for starters.

With a few clicks I had a site up and running locally. With a couple of changes to the site settings the site was available to my home network.

For the most part, the data I want to track is housed under one parent folder on my computer. So, to ensure the web site had access to these files I created a virtual directory and I was ready.