Web site

When I got involved in the family tree and wanted to make available what information my brother and I had, I settled on producing a CD which would contain not just family tree information but articles about the times and places in which people lived. I figured that the best way to make this information compatible was to use what every computer has - a browser. So regardless of computer system and browser, every one should be able to use the CD. The problem with the CD was that even though I begged people to keep the information up-to-date, I would get a flurry of e-mails after each issue of the CD telling me something was missing or wrong. Nothing wrong with that but it meant that the amendments would not appear for a year. Nevertheless this got me into web page design using HTML, the basic "language" of web pages. I produced a CD annually. Fortunately, my Reunion software allowed me to export formatted HTML pages.

Having learnt how to write up web pages, I set about producing my own web site (the first version of the one you are looking at). My service provider, BigPond, had a hosting service so I subscribed to that and began my web-site.

As an Apple user, I subscribed to .Mac ("dot mac", now "MobileMe") because it allowed me to have web pages. I thought this might be a good place to put a family tree. A web-site can be updated as soon as the addition/amendment is notified and everyone has access to the new data. However .Mac was slow to upload/synchronise and I changed to my Bigpond Hosting site. But the web-sites had another problem - security and privacy. The only way to ensure this with my genealogy software and .Mac and Bigpond Hosting was to publish a family tree with all information about living people deleted.

Then I found The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding (TNG) on the web. Actually, I had seen it before thinking I might be able to use it on a CD, but this was not technically possible. The reason for this is why a web site is necessary. It uses a "language" known as PHP which writes those html pages on the fly. It stores information in databases and access to that data is determined by how it is set up - you can require people to be registered and logged in if they want to see information about living people, and visitors can see only the surname and initials (or whatever I determine) of such people. And I control who is registered! Another advantage was that while my old system required large uploads of already formatted web pages, this one requires only a text file (a "GEDCOM" file using family tree conventions). It does not even require the whole file to be uploaded each time because I can select what data has been changed after a certain date and then upload only that data and merge it with the on-line databases.

Now I needed a web-site that handled PHP and the database language MySQL. I eventually subscribed to one of two suggested by the TNG site. I chose the domain name "royroyes.net" - no ".au" because it is located on the east coast of the USA. (I chose "royroyes" since my surname is Roy and my mother's maiden name was Royes.) This site was considerably cheaper and had a much bigger capacity than anything I could find in Australia.

So here you are. I am no expert on web-page design, having picked up what skill I do have on the fly. Still have to consult my manuals regularly to write code!