Livesretold.co.uk:About
From Livesretold.co.uk
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About Lives Retold
Lives Retold is the easy way to write a life story about yourself, or about a member of your family. It also preserves those life stories in perpetuity.
Lives Retold is based on the belief that everyone has an interesting story to tell, and that those stories deserve to be recorded - for the benefit of families and for future historians.
Your life stories can be short or long; they can be worked on at intervals and they can always be updated. Some life stories in Lives Retold are written, as mini autobiographies, by the person in question. Some are written, as mini biographies, by a child, grandchild or parent. The authorship can be mixed; you can start a life story about your child, which can then be taken over by the child and added to throughout its life. And groups of relatives can write connected life stories, like people stitiching panels of a collaborative quilt.
Please click on the following examples. You can click on any image to see it full size.
Bell.William.3.9.1792
Reid.Philip.12.1.1901
Reid.Alexander.11.1.1941
Reid.Philip.30.1.1989
Reid.Elisabeth.11.8.1992
For a list of life stories completed, or being written, please click on the Members button in the navigation box to the left.
A permanent archive
The aim of Lives Retold is to be a permanent archive, which will be freely accessible via the internet, now and in perpetuity. To ensure survival, it is intended that copies of this website will be securely archived in several different places, and will be transferred to new information storage technology as this comes into use. This Lives Retold UK website (www.livesretold.co.uk) is designed to cover the UK. It is intended to launch in due course further Lives Retold websites to cover other countries of the world.
Cost of membership
Lives Retold UK is in its trial phase. When launched, it will be open to all as means of permanently recording their own lives or those of their relatives. It is expected to be a subscription service, financed through a one-off charge to Members of about £125 for permanently hosting each life story. It is envisaged that at least half of this sum will be allocated to an endowment fund. The purpose of the endowment fund will be to produce interest to be used to finance the maintenance of the Lives Retold UK website in perpetuity. It is not intended that the website will carry any advertising.
Although £125 may seem a substantial amount, this is a one-off payment which covers permanent hosting of the life story. When spread over the life of the service (intended to be at least 100 years) it would equate to less than £2 per annum. If you would like to dive in to the current development phase, as a non-paying trial Member, please email Alex Reid at the following email address: reid 'at' dsl.pipex.com.
Lives Retold uses MediaWiki software, as used by the Wikipedia collaborative encyclopaedia. The software is user friendly, enabling life stories to be created and edited by Members online from their own homes without any knowledge of programming languages. Each life story may contain up to 50,000 words and 250 images. Help for Members on writing life stories is to be found here: Help: Contents
About us
Lives Retold UK is published by Extonet Ltd, an electronic publishing company based at 27 Millington Road, Cambridge CB3 9HW, UK.
Extonet also publishes two established websites:
Abacus Construction Index which is a directory of recommended construction websites in the UK and USA.
Beesker which recommends the world's best website on each of several hundred topics from Aardvarks to Zippers.
The directors of Extonet Ltd are Alex Reid, who is the editor of Lives Retold, and Sian Reid. Email contact: reid 'at' dsl.pipex.com. Telephone contact: +44 (0)1223 356537.
