Progress

General discussion on the Generation of HTML Web Pages
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Reggi
Posts: 52
Joined: Wed Feb 10, 2010 8:10 pm

Progress

Post by Reggi » Wed Apr 12, 2023 4:30 pm

Nowadays many users of Genealogy software wish to publish their efforts to a wider audience. Most, if not all, such programs provide tools that help by including Gedcom or HLML export. iFamily offers an HTML website feature as well as the Gedcom format

About 2015 I used the HTML tool and obtained useable results, This year having added numerous people and documents to the iFamily database I decided to update my HTML file, and thus faced a re-learning curve of how to use the various software's I’d used a few years ago. iFamily, although a few issues on, posed few problems other the ones I’d come across 6 Years previously. At first I applauded this, but them realised that iFamily had not progressed at all from those far gone days! I also have an associated title and story page which I believe first saw the light of day using the iWeb app included with ‘Snow Leopard’? I then progressed to using the shareware application ‘BlueGriffon’ to edit the html. Similar to iFamily BlueGriffon appears to have stagnated over the years, but seems to have re-emerged in the form of ‘SeaMonkey’, a Mozilla community project. However both have bugs an so I have to use both + the text editor BBEdit to clear up the mess !

Going back to iFamily there are some Bugs and many ‘Omissions’ that should have been addressed in normal development. The main annoyance is that when adding data to the tree the file names and location in the HTML folders alter thus rubbishing any links to my original story page - OK fixed with BlueGriffon but such a PAIN. It now makes me nervous of updating my iFamily tree.

Another problem I've just noticed is that unlike some ‘Modern’ programs iFamily does not export all the source information included in its Media Folder, well it gives notes but not a direct link to the item in the folder - my iFamily Pictures Folder has about 4500 files - jpg. PDF. rtf. - and such like including photos and PDF files of census scans etc. iFamily’s html export function duly exports this Pictures Folder (using almost 500K of data) but when ’surfing’ the resultant web site there is no direct link to the document which iFamily has itself provided! I had to do a dirty work around when I recently sent a CD of my iFamily html to a close relative by also including a website generated from the freeware program ‘Ancestris’ which at least gives links and search to its Pictures / Source documents.

As an enhancement to the original iFamily html export I included - Hacked - a ‘Back’ button to the html explorer files, all X-Thousand of them, using BBEdit and its search and replace function - took hours of crunching but success! OK you can use the Browsers Back button, but ease of ’Surfing’ is all the rage today - Get with it! Whilst about it I also put in a ‘Home’ bottom and ‘Index’ button.

I also have some comments on iFamily’s Gedcom export which still suffers some annoying bugs, but will put them on the Gedcom section of this Forum later.

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