Life's A Journey - Save Every Step New website brings old memories to life... Website: www.SaveEveryStep.com For my dad, now 75, it was following the milkman's horse with a shovel; for me, it was the Bay City Rollers and fishing for crabs in rock-pools; for my 10 year old son it will probably be MP3s and pocket video games. Everyone has them, those precious little memories that make the texture of life, in-between the big events, like the first day at school or last day at work. Teddy bears and wedding dresses, baking with mum, paddling pools and building dens in the endless summer holidays. Capturing all these memories, big and small and saving them for future generations, was the inspiration for SaveEveryStep.com. It was only when I lost my own mum, whilst pregnant with my youngest son, that I realised I didn't fully understand who she was or what had shaped her life. Sure, I had a box of sepia photographs with names and dates, but the richness of her human story was lost forever - her loves, triumphs, tragedies, and the emotions which underpinned them all will always be a mystery to me. The irony of youth, of course, is that you appreciate pretty much nothing until you're no longer young, and in my case it was then too late to ask. SaveEveryStep.com is designed for building life stories online and sharing them with friends, relatives and the wider world on an interactive timeline. A sort of digital diary which lays out the precious events of your life in the order they happened. Photos and other media enrich the expandable events, and are kept safely online, where they'll never get faded, damaged or lost. Each story is laid out on a "LifeLine," the scrollable, zoomable heart of the site, as a journey through the years. which can be linked to the LifeLines of friends & family, and even signposted with major world events. Security settings allow fine tuning for granting access to whoever the user wants to see the various elements in their story - from named visitors only, right through to the whole world. SaveEveryStep.com has been built with multiple generations in mind. One day in the future, someone may be investigating you as part of your family tree. They might end up with a standard list of names and dates, but imagine the difference it would make to discover a complete account of your life, and the lives of your family members. Even pets can have a lifeline! I used to have one of those baby books when my kids were small, and I religiously recorded all their firsts... first solid food, first steps etcetera. The books are tatty now, but their Lifelines are packed with these facts and the stories and photographs which accompany them. The best part of all is that they can continue to add to their ever-developing stories for the rest of their lives. My father tells tales of growing up in 1930s Birmingham, in a house with no hot water and a widowed mother whose eldest son was flying Lancaster Bombers over Nazi Germany. To my own 10-year-old son, this was so far from his reality, it may as well have been on the PlayStation I had to drag him off to learn about his granddad. I feel we have a responsibility to capture who we are and what shapes us, for future generations, and this digital "time capsule" is a good place to start. Helen Spencer (Founder of: www.SaveEveryStep.com) For further information visit www.SaveEveryStep.com, or contact via e-mail or call 07957-627217 (UK).
Everyone can access the site, where registration is free. The Lifeline runs on Microsoft Silverlight software bringing you a fully interactive timeline. It is a safe Microsoft product, free to download and only takes a few seconds. |
