Webb Family Blog

As I first mentioned in my first post of the year, I have been hosting a new genealogy website. I guess I failed to inform people via the blog that I have enhanced it over a little while. The data in the genealogy website is mostly via the work of my brother Richard. He maintains most of the information on software that is designed for the Apple Mac OS-X-based computers, I believe the software is Reunion. That software is capable of creating web content, but does so via static web pages. This collection of static web pages takes up over 120 MB and if one change is made, sometimes most of those pages will require updating… a complete waste of bandwidth. I realized that somewhere out there, there has to be a much better way. That initial website was at http://genealogy.kellieron.net (no longer exists). I figured that software that stores all the data in a MySQL database and accesses it via PHP would make for much easier changes. It also allows for some people to see protected info and to block the access to others. I found software that did exactly this; it is called The Next Generation. By using PHP and MySQL, many add-ons or features may also be easily added. This new program ran at http://family.kellieron.net and it initially ran on Host Department’s web servers.

I believe I’ve successfully moved all my old genealogy site from my old host to my GoDaddy account. In addition, I registered another domain specifically for the genealogy site. You may still get to the site via the old address, but the new domain seems more appropriate; http://www.WebbFamilies.com. I know that relatively few of my family accesses this site, but I figured that I needed to either move it or lose it. I had a few interesting issues when moving the data over. I thought I had properly exported the old database, but I guess I only got a small portion of it. The entire database was apparently too large to access the easiest way. The database is between 7-8 MB in size and the easy way of transferring data limits the size to around 2 MB. I finally realized this and got it fixed. Then, I had a few other weird issues I found out. I found out that my old site had been hacked. Apparently, while it could not be seen, there were many links to spam sites. I’ll have to keep closer tabs on this in the future.

For those that are not related to me, you will not be able to find any viable information on anyone on the genealogy site that is related to me. Any guest may see limited info by logging in with a username and password of guest. If you are related to me and you would like to have full read access to the genealogy info, you can fill in the registration info on the login page. This will not give you immediate full access, but I get a request that you’d like access; I can grant or deny the request.

I have been tweaking more with the design of my website. I decided that I’d try to widen the web page. I changed my resolution on my screen to 1024×768 and found that it still fit fairly well. Few people run resolutions less than this now. If the page is too wide for you, let me know and I can change it back, but I think I like it better this way. My standard resolution on my desktop is 1280×1024, so I still have gray on either side of the screen. By widening the screen, some of my new ideas for adding media work better.

No, DNS headaches are not a new medical malady, but rather the frustration I’ve been having with moving my domain name from one server to another. As I briefly mentioned in my post, New Host, computers use IP addresses to identify themselves. It is often difficult for people to remember a ton of numbers, so descriptive words are used, like “kellieron.net.” From the choices I had a few years ago, that was the best I could come up with… listing both mine and Kellie’s first names. Anyway, to translate between the words to numbers, requires the use of Domain Name Servers (DNS). With the millions of users throughout the world, having one central location that every computer must connect to before going elsewhere is not feasible, so there are thousands of Domain Name Servers around the world. When a change is made, it takes time for all these thousands of servers to get the new information. Apparently, many of you, as have I, have had problems being directed to the proper server. I had intended on making the New Host story be the first story on the new server, but due to a DNS error, it posted to the old server first. I then posted a story about Fish Camp, and that became the first new server only story. That story required the new server as integrating a Google Map was one of the new features.

Some of you receive emails whenever a new post is made, and gives you a link to follow to the new post. If it was pointing you to the wrong server, you would get a “404 Error”, which means that it can’t find the page you were requesting. I’m sorry if you had that issue, but over the next few days, most DNS servers should have updated their information to show the change in addresses.

I’ve been at it again. This time, I’ve added a simple photo gallery to the blog. It isn’t as perfect as I’d like, but it was fairly simple. I used a plugin called "Duh Gallery". I have had to make a few modifications to it and there is apparently a size limit to the pictures. Apparently the person that wrote this made it for a language other than English, as the "Previous" and "Next" buttons were in a foreign language. I also had to work out a few other small bugs. I now have it working at least. In case you are curious as to the names of the galleries, they are taken from the directory the pictures are located in; Linux does not allow for spaces and punctuation in the names of directories. So far, I’ve added 2 galleries… pictures taken by my mother-in-law Donna Weifert at a family gathering at Sizzler in Roseville, and pictures taken by my father Fred Webb at our Mother’s Day gathering at our house. Eventually, I’ll have some of our wedding pictures up here as well as other galleries.

First off, I’m new to all this stuff.  I’m not a programmer, but I am trying to understand the scripting going on here.  I found Matt Didcoe’s Weather.com Plugin for WordPress, but had issues with the graphics that it used.  For one, I thought they were a bit small.  Also, it seemed like many of the weather conditions were grouped together with the same graphic.  I looked into the weather.php file and saw how it grouped the different weather conditions.  Apparently, Weather.com uses numbered codes… 1-47 for different weather conditions (i.e. #19="Dusty" or #25="Frigid")  Some of the codes refer to night time while some refer to day time.  I also saw how the php script grabbed each graphic, by assigning the graphic name for a group of conditions.  The initial set of icons in the group are GIFs.  I found the set of icons included in Weather.com’s SDK were a bit more to my liking and already numbered based on the conditions.  These graphics are PNGs instead.  I did a little messing with the file and got it to work more to the way I wanted it to.