The birthdate calculator produces an earliest and latest possible birthdate from the limited information it has. This birthdate range can be stored in various genealogy and family history programs. However, the format needed to input a date into the various programs is very variable. So, it’s possible to customise the format produced by the birthdate calculator.
If you touch the ‘Settings’ button, editable panels appear for setting up the format of a date and the format of a ‘between-dates’ explanation. You can use any mix of day, date, month, year, earliest date, latest date and fixed text. Once you have the date looking how you like, you can touch ‘Save Options’ to store those settings in the URL, and then you can bookmark that URL and come back to it when you need.
Firefox seems to have a bug with editing the custom formats and needs an extra space at the end. I’m working on that. And, Safari is not terribly reliable at copying the birthdates to the clipboard. I’m working on that too 🙁
Any other bugs? Post here and I’ll see what I can do.
None of this has been tested with Internet Explorer.
Hi
This is good and very helpful. However if I try to alter the date format to the UK day, month, year and then save when I attempt to reaccess I get an Access Forbidden message.
Am I doing something wrong please?
Oh dear, sorry about that! I’ve actually forgotten all about this. I need to check that it all still works. I’ll try to do that this evening, 2018-06-18. Ping me again if I forget!
I just checked. You’re entirely correct, if you save the obscure URL and try to use it to access the page again, you get a 403 Forbidden message. The problem is caused by the encoding of html elements into the options string. It seems that since I wrote the original code, the shared server on which it runs has been upgraded to try to reject some attack using a strange URL, and it’s now refusing my custom URL format.
I need to dust off this very dusty deck and modify the way the options are encoded. I can’t do that this evening but I’ll get to it in a few days. Please ping me if I don’t leave a message to say it’s fixed.