FamilyTimes User's Manual

While keeping an online journal is pretty easy, there are some advanced features that you might be interested in. This manual is a growing collection of How-To articles for the ambitious user.

FamilyTimes.com Membership Features

General features
Online Journals - FamilyTimes.com members can keep an online journal, or blog to record and share their memories, opinions, and traditions.
detailed information 
Photo Album - Registered members can share and record photos using the new photo album feature. Pick out the best photographs from an event and post them to your site, where friends and family can enjoy them immediately, and you can enjoy them for years to come.
 
Recipes - Members can record and share favorite recipes with our easy to use recipe form. Your children will love having a record of their favorite dishes easily accessible on the internet.
 

Getting Started

If you have any questions or requests, please email us. In the meantime, here are a few good starting points for your journal.
• Add a new journal entry.
  Here are some journal entry ideas to help you get started.
• Change your journal name.
  Here are some ideas for naming your journal:
  • Smith Family Memoirs
  • John Smith's Family Blog
  • Smith Family Journal
  • Sally Smith's Family WebSite.
• Add a biography that will appear at the top of your journal
• Play games
• Tell a story to your kids
• Shop
• Tell family and friends about FamilyTimes.com
• Read what others are saying about FamilyTimes.com.

Journal Entry Ideas

Looking for suggestions for what to write about in your family journal? You've come to the right place.

For many, the idea of keeping a family journal is enticing, but looking at the blank screen and deciding what to write is daunting. Follow the links below for some familytimes inspiration!

Appreciate Someone

Here is a tough journal writing suggestion. Pick someone, a child, spouse, parent or friend and think deeply about all the things you appreciate about them. Now write it down in your journal, you can write it as a list, a poem or a letter.

By writing it in your journal, it won't be lost over time and it can be revisited when that relationship is strained.

This is a great birthday gift. It is made by you, very personal and will almost certainly make the recipient feel great!

Define Success

Take some time to discuss the concept of success with your family (adults and children). See if you can get each of them to define what success means to them. You might find the answers surprising. When discussing this with your children, you'll want to choose your questions carefully so you don't tip them off to your own definition for success and potentially impact their answer. Here are a few questions you can use to aid the discussion:
• How do you know if someone is succesful?
• Are there different kinds of success?
• Can someone be successful and unsuccessful at the same time?
• How do you want to be successful?
• Finish the sentence "Success is ..."
If you want to include extended family, use the share this feature to send them the link to your journal entry and ask them to submit their definitions as comments.

Interview Your Child

Take some time to record your child's likes, values and opinions, it will be fun to see how they change over time.

Below are some suggested interview questions to get you started. Try to engage your child in a discussion and record the complete and original answers -- no matter how silly.
• What is your favorite food?
• What is your favorite sport?
• What is your favorite game?
• What is your favorite subject in school?
• What is your favorite song?
• What is your favorite musical instrument?
• What is your favorite book?
• What is your favorite movie?
• What are your favorite places to go?
• Who is your hero?
• Who are your best friends?
• What skill would you most like to learn?
• What do you want to do when you are an adult?
• If you were an animal, which animal would you be?

Make a list

We make lists all the time, grocery lists, chores lists, errends lists. They are pretty easy to write, but not usually fun and certainly not worth saving. But there are lists that would be wonderful to revisit years from now. Here are some suggestions:
• A list of your child's closest friends.
• A list of cute things your child has said or done.
• A list of things you love about someone (spouse, child, parent or friend).
• A list of things you are grateful for.
• A list of family traditions.
• A list of your child's favorite toys.
If you have you own list ideas, please share them with other journaler's by adding a comment at the bottom of this page.

Photograph your child's artwork

Children are prolific artists. From a very young age, they start presenting you with gifts they've made themeselves.

Some of the artwork, while cute, is big and bulky and doesn't really fit with your decor.

You can encourage your child's artistic talent, show your gratitude and pride in their accomplishments by posting a picture of the artwork to your online journal. Posted to your journal, the artwork is recorded in chronological order and can be shared with relatives.

Your child will be proud to see his or her artwork on the computer and will like sharing it with relatives.

To get the best photographs, place the artwork on a white background near a window in early morning or evening. Use the photo editing software that came with your camera to crop the image. By cropping, you can trim the excess background and emphasize the artwork.

Take a look at what some kids and parents have submitted to our Kids Art Gallery.

Ponder Prolifically

"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man." - Francis Bacon

A journal is a great place to explore your life lessons, express your deeply held beliefs and develop your opinions. As Francis Bacon observed, the act of writing brings clarity to the author. This might be a result of revisions, structure or simply the time available for expression, whatever the reason, its benefits are hard to dispute.

An added benefit to sharing and recording these thoughts is that they can be passed down as part of your legacy, to children and even grand children.

I've found this to be a very natural use of my journal, from my recent posts about passion and lifes choices to my first journal entry on September 12th, 2001. These ponderings have helped me clear my mind, understand myself better and free myself to move on.

If you are looking for inspiration, or a muse to get started, you might try reading famous quotes, reading others opinions, or simply waiting ... inspiration will find you.

Record Your Favorite Family Activities

My son suggested that people could write about things they like doing with their families. I thought this was a great idea.

You might consider things you do around the house, like crafts, specific board games or TV programs you enjoy together.

You could also write about traditional meals or weekend destinations. In fact, if you are keeping your journal at FamilyTimes.com, I suggest using our recipe entry form. You'll see a link to it under "Create Journal Entry" on the right side of the page. This may be where your children look for the recipe when they grow older and want to carry on the tradition.

When you are writing about these activities, think about why you enjoy them and what they mean to you. For example, in our family, we like spending time at local parks where we can hike or paddle. It gives us some time together, without the distractions of TV, neighborhood friends, phone calls and emails. We always feel closer and more at peace after a day at the park.

Share Family Recipes

An online journal is a great place to record and share your favorite family recipes. They become immediately accessible to relatives and friends that have enjoyed meals at your table and may be a reference for your children when they move into their own apartment and want some home cooked meals.

FamilyTimes journalers have a special form they can use to post recipes, but it really isn't necessary. Just write it down like you would on a recipe card.

It might be nice to include a note about when the meal was traditionaly eaten, or if it goes really well with a specific side dish.

Share your knowledge.

One of the benefits of an online journal is that knowledge shared can be accessed by anyone at anytime. So if you've come up with a creative solution to a common problem, have a wonderful recipe to share, or a fun way to help your child learn subtraction, post-it to your online journal. If you take the time to write it, chances are someone will appreciate it.

It doesn't matter if you don't know anyone who would be interested right now. 3 years from now, your cousin might want be curious about that traditional family recipe or tomorrow morning, a stranger from halfway around the globe may be looking for help teaching subraction.

In many respects, this is one of the most constructive and courteous entries an author can make.

Use the News

Your weblog or online journal can be a powerful tool for democracy. Consider using it as a tool to engage friends and family in political discourse.

You might start by tracking the news issues that you care about. In fact you can use google's news service to help you do this. For example, visit news.google.com and enter a search phrase, for example Environment Congress and bookmark it. Now you can simply check this bookmark to track congressional decisions impacting the environment. You can use this same technique for local news as well.

Now, as you see something that concerns you, post a link to it in your journal and state your concerns. It's as simple as that. Friends, family and even strangers can engage you in discussion about this news.

To take it a step further, provide the following links and encourage your readers to speak out.
Write your Representative.
Write your elected officials.

If you are an active citizen, you probably belong to one or more organizations and are being encouraged to take action on a variety of issues. On issues that hit home, post your own thoughts about them in your online journal and share them with friends and family.

How To Blog (for families)

Why not treat your journal as a Family Weblog? Blogs are a relatively new concept and are hard to define because they take on so many forms. In fact, many definitions of blogs describe them as online journals. However, if we look closely at blogs, we'll find many different variations which we can borrow from.

Linking - Some of the earliest blogs were simply a chronological listing of interesting links the author found on the Internet and wanted to share with friends and family. Basically, the author took the links that were sent to him or her in emails and instead of forwarding them to a few more friends, simply posted them to his blog for all to see. Give it a shot! In fact, if you are looking for cool sites to share with your friends visit http://www.daypop.com/top/. A site which highlights the most popular sites being discovered by other bloggers.

News and Opinion - Many blogs now focus on recent events. Bloggers use their blogs as ways to call attention to news that they find important and often - but not always - share an opinion about that news. Applied to family blogging, it seems quite natural. You might for example what to share a review for a good family movie or news about product recalls.

Reaching out - Many bloggers are simply reaching out to anyone who might care. Discussing their personal challenges and joys. Overcoming the challenges of parenting is quite difficult, you might find support found via your blog will ease your burden.

I hope this gives you enough ideas to get started on an interesting and rewarding family blog.

Formatting Your Journal Entries

For many posts, straight forward text is sufficient. However, sometimes, you'll want to emphasis a word, create section headings or write a list. To do this, you will need to put some basic markup in your entry. I hope this brief and direct post tells you all that you need to know.

Bold - If you wish to write in bold letters, simply surround the word with <b>and </b>. When you preview or post your text the special tags, <b> and </b> will be hidden, and the word will be in bold. Go ahead and expirement, you can even use the comment form at the bottom of this entry.

Italicize - For a more subtle emphasis, you might try italics. Simply wrap the text you would like to italicize with <i and </i>. Again, you will be able to see the markup when editing the post, but when viewing the post, the text will be italicized and the markup will be hidden.

Lists Things get a little more complex when you want to make a bullet list. You'll need to mark the beginning and end of the list with <ul> and </ul>, UL stands for Unordered List, and you'll need to mark the beginning of every bullet with a <li>. Here is a sample list markup:

<ul>
• <li> first bullet
• <li> second bullet
</ul>

Line Breaks - Sometimes, you'll want to create more white space between lines and paragraphs. To tell the system to display this white space, simply include a <br> for every line you would like to add.

About

Our Mission:

Help people create, share, and record great family times.


We are taking many steps to accomplish our mission. To help your family create great family times, we provide free printable short stories, challenging games and a selection of wonderful family products. We are excited to offer a premier journaling service that can make sharing, organizing, and recording those great family times both easy and fun.

Our Values:

We believe that family relationships are paramount. By continuously improving these relationships, we feel the entire family is rewarded with greater peace, happiness and success.

We value the important role parents play in developing their child's physical, social, mental, and emotional well being.

We believe that openness, honesty, kindness, and generosity are critical in all relationships and hope to demonstrate these characteristics with our customers.

We believe that in the minds and hearts of people all over the world are amazing stories, brilliant ideas and a collective wisdom. We are striving to make FamilyTimes a place where these hidden treasures are discovered and shared.

Our Thanks:

This site has been built by a team of wonderful, creative and generous people and runs on top of the Drupal engine, an open-source project. As such, we owe our gratitude to many, including:

Dries Buytaert - Software Engineer, PHD Student and Drupal founder
Gerhard Killesreiter - Drupal Contributor
Moshe Weitzman - Drupal developer available for hire

Press Releases

Welcome to FamilyTimes.com's press pages. Simply click the headlines below to read the full text.

FamilyTimes.com launches an online journaling service for families
Enabling families to share and record their lives, this service is a new twist on the self publishing trend known as blogging and is tailored to the needs of families wishing to build a legacy.