CREATING THIS WEBSITE

Creating this website has been a testing but enjoyable experience for me. It is only my second attempt, the first being the little known site dedicated to my TURPIN family that dates back to 2003. However, "My Turpin Family", was the almost totally automated creation of John Cardinal's Second Site programme, a companion product of The Master Genealogist (TMG), by Wholly Genes.

TMG is the family history project manager and database that I have used for many years for my genealogy research. Second Site reads the database and with very little intervention from the user it can produce a wonderful web site. I was always pleased with "My Turpin Family", and some of it is incorporated into this site, but increasingly I wanted to have a go at creating a site from scratch, and learning the hard way. This is the result.

I started by experimenting with various WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") software programmes that create web sites from templates. However, with every one that I tried I felt that I was missing out on learning a programming language, which is what I really wanted to do. So I have set about learning HTML and more recently XHTML, the EXtensible HyperText Markup Language, which I am told is a reformulation of HTML 4 as an XML 1.0 application, whatever that means.

I am learning the rudiments of CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, a language for specifying the appearance of text and other elements. CSS provides the ability to separate the layout and styles of a web page from the data or information, and by separating the presentation style of documents from the content of documents, it simplifies Web authoring and site maintenance. Sounds good to me!

  

I have used two excellent software programmes to create this web site: NavStudio by OpenCube to produce the navigation or menu system, and PSPad, a web authoring text and code editor by Jan Fiala who lives in the Czech Republic. PSPad is a freeware editor. NavStudio costs!

For the Photo Gallery I have made extensive use of a web album producer called Porta. Mikkel B. Stegmann's Porta turns an image directory into a neatly formatted web photo album, very fast indeed. The web images are high-resolution and there are a number of album formats.

Mikkel's choice of name for the software is from Giambattista della Porta (1535-1615) who was the first to add a convex lens to the camera obscura. This amplified its light sensitivity significantly and thus constituted a major step towards the cameras of today. Add the meaning of the Latin word porta (gate) and you have the full "story-behind-the-name".

Finally, for transferring files to and from this site by using FTP (File Transfer Protocol), EngInSite DataFreeway, by LuckaSoft Software, is a very useful program: easy to use, easy to install, and available free of charge. I came across it by recommendation of Dick Eastman, creator of the well-known genealogy newsletter Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, and I have even borrowed his words to describe it.

Sometimes, just for a change, I use another client application for transferring files between my PC and the site, called JFTP, by Sai Pullabhotla of jMethods. The Non-Commercial License allows use of JFTP for free with no feature limitations and no time limit. JFTP version 4.0 is written entirely in Java™, meaning it can run on a wide variety of platforms such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, Unix or any other platform with a compatible JVM (Java Virtual Machine). It is very good.