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Sharing Your Family with the World

When I first thought about creating a website to share information on my family name with the world, I was a little apprehensive. I had never created a website before and the Internet language was confusing. Still, I believed with a little reading and help from my Internet friends, a basic website could be made.

At first, I thought I would have to learn a whole new language, but before long, I realized that most of the on-line programs took care of the HTML. I didn't need to know a thing about it.

After a little research, I decided to create my website on Geocites because web space was free. Yahoo Geocities (http://geocities.yahoo.com/) provided the software required to create the website and launch it to the Internet. The whole process seemed simple; idiot proof; perfect for me. After struggling for several nights formatting pages, entering data, adding links, accidentally deleting a few pages and recreating new pages, I was ready for the world wide web.

After several failed attempts at posting the pages to the Internet, I realized I had to name my first page index'. Once I did that, my website was available to the world.

Another problem I encountered was with posting images. After several attempts, I learned file names could not contain spaces. For example, uncle john' did not work, but unclejohn' and uncle_john' did.

This website was created in 2000. It was somewhat easy to maintain, but the biggest drawback was that I couldn't copy and paste information onto the pages I was creating. I had to retype it all. This was not only time consuming, sometimes, human errors were made.

When I decided to create another website, I decided to use the free space provided by my Internet Service Provider (ISP). I learned to create pages with Netscape Composer. This program is as easy to use as WordPerfect. Font size, colour and style could be chosen and changed on a whim, tables could be made and images inserted with ease. And I could copy and paste text from just about any source.

Within a short time, I had a presentable web page ready for the web. Unfortunately, my ISP nor Netscape Composer had launching capabilities. That means, my pages were on my hard drive, but not on the Internet. I needed File Transfer Protocal (FTP) software to get my files from the hard drive to the world wide web.

With a little help from my nephew, I learned to use Cute FTP, but things did not run smoothly. It took forever for the pages to upload. Still, my pages were

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