19 replies to this topic

[KimMC]

I'm testing out RM6 new website generator locally.  I love the new format but I've found an issue.

First when your on the persons web page, it is not showing the shared facts properly.  For example if I have a census fact shared and in each person I have a custom note.  The old html generator would show this custom note ok.  On the new publisher it only shows the primary person's note.  So if I click on the note for say the 1891 census for a child it shows her fathers note and not hers.  Same issue with say a note for a baptism sponsor etc.

Another thing last night in the webinar Bruce said that the photos would show a caption.  They are not showing any captions or descriptions for me and I did double check they do show in my RM6 database.

[TomH]

I get captions but they are suppressed if the mouse pointer hovers over the image. But I have captions in the metadata so I'm not sure where they are coming from.

[KimMC]

TomH, on 22 November 2012 - 07:30 AM, said:

I get captions but they are suppressed if the mouse pointer hovers over the image. But I have captions in the metadata so I'm not sure where they are coming from.

Thank Tom,  my captions are not in the metadata, I'm working at going through and adding them that way.  But currently they are entered only in RM and are not showing on the site.  I've also tried moving the mouse off the photo and it still doesn't show.

[TomH]

Kim, if you are a bit of a computer nerd as I am you might find this interesting, if not useful: Media Metadata, Read, Write, Compare with Picasa

[KimMC]

I also see that it is loading the images for sources, even though I had only selected primary photos.  I think that there needs to be an option to include or exclude source images.  For example you might have scans of personal letters attached to sources that you don't want just anyone to read.  Or you might have scans of book pages that are still in print.  This is fine for personal use, but you can't repost them.
I also tried unchecking the photo box and leaving only the primary photo box checked.  Doing it this way produces no photos.  Checking the share photos AND the only primary photos box produced one image for each person AND all source and fact images.

I would LOVE LOVE it if we could mark individual images as private when adding them to the database.  In some cases you might want to show multiple photos for an ancestor but have a few that were given to you and may have been asked not to publish them.  Or they could be photos from books that you can't republish, but keep for personal use.
You might only have 1 photo of a person and have it set as a primary photo, but can not for what ever reason post it online.  So being able to mark it private would also help in that situation.

[KimMC]

TomH, on 22 November 2012 - 08:35 AM, said:

Kim, if you are a bit of a computer nerd as I am you might find this interesting, if not useful: Media Metadata, Read, Write, Compare with Picasa

Thank Tom, I have that page booked marked.   I use Linux and for my photos I use Digikam.  I've been hoping to find time to try copying what you've done with Picasa but with Digikam.

[alansogd]

KimMC, I'm the developer behind the new websites and upload service. If you would be willing to upload a portion of your database that is exhibiting the problem to my.rootsmagic.com and provide a link to a page where you are seeing the issues, it would help me a lot in tracking down the bugs. If you are unwilling to post your data online right now (which is understandable), then I may come back later with some more questions for you when I am trying to reproduce the problems. Thanks

[KimMC]

alansogd, on 22 November 2012 - 10:57 AM, said:

KimMC, I'm the developer behind the new websites and upload service. If you would be willing to upload a portion of your database that is exhibiting the problem to my.rootsmagic.com and provide a link to a page where you are seeing the issues, it would help me a lot in tracking down the bugs. If you are unwilling to post your data online right now (which is understandable), then I may come back later with some more questions for you when I am trying to reproduce the problems. Thanks

You've done a great job with the new websites.   I'm trying to upload my site to my.rootsmagic.com right now but it's been sitting at "Preparing files to publish" for a while now.  The first time it looked like it had frozen at that stage.  Now I finally get past it and it tells me my site is to large to publish.  A suggestion, there should be something to indicate the final file size when you are selecting the people for the website. As it takes a long time for the program to generate the files and get to the publish stage.
I will go back and create a smaller file and see if that works.

But in the mean time, I did upload it to my site on RootsWeb Freepages, here is the link http://freepages.roo...ills/index.html
I've been playing with the html for the home page a bit and added my site counter, links and guestbook but other wise have not touched the files.

[KimMC]

Ok, it's up.  Much faster with just a small group. lol  The site is http://my.rootsmagic.com/kmills  for some reason it didn't set the root person as the person I selected when picking "ancestors of".  So here is a link to the main person. http://my.rootsmagic...igree.html#2045
You can see an example of the mixed up shared notes on this person http://my.rootsmagic...dual.html#37576 The census notes shown are the ones entered in her husbands note not hers.
For some odd yet good reason after remaking my site the photo captions are showing. But I notice it doesn't show the photo description field.  That is were I normally put the photo credit.  Is it possible to have the option to show that?
But you can see that the fact and source images are showing, when I had selected only primary photos.

Hope this helps!

[TomH]

There's a bug in the Name Index in Kim's large FreePages website for the H's. Clcik on H, you get the first page down to Hebert and the top of the list has two links:

• Haber-Hebert
  
• Hébert-Hynan

The second links to an empty list. I suspect something is happening with the accent, because there are other letters with multiple pages that do work.

[alansogd]

KimMC,

That does help, thank you. It looks like the root of the problem is in the data being exported by RootsMagic, so it is not in my power to solve it by myself

But I'll make sure it makes it into our bug tracker.

As of right now, RootsMagic also does not export Photo descriptions -- only captions. This may be extended later but it isn't a priority as far as I know.

Tom, good catch on that bug. It is almost surely because of the accent, and I'll take a look at it more carefully next week after the holidays.

[KimMC]

TomH, on 22 November 2012 - 05:09 PM, said:

There's a bug in the Name Index in Kim's large FreePages website for the H's. Clcik on H, you get the first page down to Hebert and the top of the list has two links:

• Haber-Hebert
  
• Hébert-Hynan

The second links to an empty list. I suspect something is happening with the accent, because there are other letters with multiple pages that do work.

Ahh thanks for catching that Tom!  With French and Swedish ancestry quite a few names have accents...

[KimMC]

alansogd, on 22 November 2012 - 05:22 PM, said:

KimMC,

That does help, thank you. It looks like the root of the problem is in the data being exported by RootsMagic, so it is not in my power to solve it by myself

But I'll make sure it makes it into our bug tracker.

As of right now, RootsMagic also does not export Photo descriptions -- only captions. This may be extended later but it isn't a priority as far as I know.

Tom, good catch on that bug. It is almost surely because of the accent, and I'll take a look at it more carefully next week after the holidays.

Thanks for checking it out!   And enjoy your holidays!  You guys have done some great work.

[KimMC]

TomH, on 22 November 2012 - 05:09 PM, said:

There's a bug in the Name Index in Kim's large FreePages website for the H's. Clcik on H, you get the first page down to Hebert and the top of the list has two links:

• Haber-Hebert
  
• Hébert-Hynan

The second links to an empty list. I suspect something is happening with the accent, because there are other letters with multiple pages that do work.

Ok I wanted to test this out.  I found the ONE Hebert in my file that had the accent on their name and removed that.  I'm in the process of uploading a new copy, but as it's already gotten past the H section I can see that it fixed the problem.  http://freepages.roo...l#Haber|Hebert So the accents must be messing something up.

[alansogd]

I missed an earlier comment. The reason the publisher doesn't warn you beforehand that your site is too large is because it would be very difficult to tell whether it is or not until all the pages are generated. It's probably possible to make an estimate beforehand based on the size of your data, but because of the complexity involved it's likely this won't happen, at least not in the near future.

By the way, the accent is definitely the problem. The default sorting algorithm puts accented letters after the end of the alphabet, so it is almost like sorting "Hzbert-Hynan", which would return no results. Taking out the accents is a fine workaround until we update with a fix.

[khaden]

Weirdest thing...   I've been trying to upload a replacement file.  First I deleted the site, but not my account.  I created the new site and looked at it in my browser.  All OK.  When I published, the old site reappeared.  So I've tried several different things.  I moved the old site's location on my computer so the path would not be present.  I tried naming the new site other names - even giving it the exact same name as the original site.  No matter what I do, the old site keeps coming up - it apparently was never truly deleted from My RootsMagic.  Any ideas?  It's here:  http://my.rootsmagic.com/khaden/

I did create a second account and upload another file, but then I was told on another Board that we could have two.  Perhaps not?  Although why would the old file keep reappearing on the original site.


Actually I answered this myself.  I had to clear the cache in my browser - the new website had replaced the old one!

[TomH]

I remember way back in my modestly intense period learning HTML trying to deliver a regular refresh of a changing page that even routers on the Internet would cache pages and get in the way of my updates being displayed. I don't know if that still happens but seems likely. I learned that routers read the HTML header and if I entered a statement something like "PRAGMA="no-cache"" they would not cache the file. Alan, the website developer, may have to add something like that to each page.

There have also been problems arising from the time it takes for the my.rootsmagic.com server to complete the Delete Website task. Start an upload too soon and some of the new files might be deleted. But it is advisable to delete because old files that are not replaced by the new upload remain and browser history may well point to them.

It would be preferable if there was a Sync My Website function in addition to or instead of the full upload. It would simply ensure that the online website mirrored the local master by uploading only new or revised files and deleting those online ones not present in the master. Hmmm, I guess I'm thinking of a model where one grows a website a few files at a time, not this full website at a time where every file except the JavaScript, style and icon files are new, even though many might be identical to the old. For efficiency, instead of time stamp comparisons, the server would have to return a list of files with checksums to the client for it to decide what actions to take.

[alansogd]

The caching is only happening on the browser level. I have a fix in mind and it is high on my priority list right now, because it is an annoying problem. In the meantime, clearing your browser cache should fix it for you every time.

Because the websites are stored on Amazon S3 (it is the most cost effective for making a free service like this), I don't have control over HTTP headers so I can't force the browser not to cache files. However, if RootsMagic exports a new version number for each update (which it doesn't, yet), I can use this to force the redownload of updated assets.

Tom, the deletion issue has been fixed. Deletions are usually much faster now, and they are cancelled if they are running when you start a new upload, so you shouldn't get a conflict. In addition, uploads now manually delete several important config files so information from your old site won't conflict with a newly uploaded site. If it looks like there's a conflict, it is extremely likely that it is a local caching issue rather than conflicting data on the server itself.

I agree that it would be a great for RootsMagic to keep track of only the changed files so uploads could be a lot smaller, and we've talked about it a little bit over here. It's a lot of work on the desktop side to keep track of the additional information, and we decided not to deal with it at this time. It is possible that in the future this discussion will come up again and you may see a feature like this.

[TomH]

It's great to have you participating in the forum, Alan. Direct discussion with the developer promotes the possibility of rapid application improvement in line with user experience and objectives.

[Ludlow Bay]

TomH, on 24 November 2012 - 09:28 AM, said:

It's great to have you participating in the forum, Alan. Direct discussion with the developer promotes the possibility of rapid application improvement in line with user experience and objectives.

Unlike anything we usually see from the rest of the staff.    (Other than "it's been added to the tracking system").  Your participation and candor is indeed refreshing.