How to
Make Kehilalinks Pages
Go "Live"
Introduction
By this time in the course, you are probably fairly far along in
creating your Kehilalinks sites. You know how to insert and edit
text, links, and images; you can arrange your pages in sophisticated
ways with tables; you can make your site colorful and even
"animated" to a degree; and you may have a visitor counter and
embedded objects. Now it is finally time to reveal your creation to
the world.
When You are
Ready, Make your Pages "Live"
Please note that, even though you may have already uploaded your
pages to the Kehilalinks server and can access them there, they are
not yet "live" in the sense that Kehilalinks has not yet made a link
to them from the main Kehilalinks directory pages, so no one but you
knows to look at them. Before Kehilalinks will add a link and make
your pages public, you need to make sure that your site follows all
of the Kehilalinks and JewishGen policies.
Kehilalinks has created a technical checklist that you should go
through before "going live". It can be found at http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/documentation/writing.htm#tech.
That includes a link to a "Readiness Checklist" that has even more
detailed questions. If you have any questions about anything on
those checklists, ask about it in the class forum or contact the
Kehilalinks coordinators at kehilahelp@jewishgen.org.
If you've been using the course template as the basis for your site,
however, your site probably already satisfies all of the Kehilalinks
requirements.
When you are satisfied that your site is ready to be unveiled,
contact the Kehilalinks coordinators (that address again: kehilahelp@jewishgen.org)
and ask them to add the link on the Kehilalinks directory. They'll
look it over, maybe make a few suggestions, create the link, and
then the world will be able to see your site.
A suggestion:
don't wait until you have something that you think is "finished";
just put up a simple site to start and improve it as you go along.
The sooner you "go live" with your site, the sooner people can
find it and send you more information to put on the site!
After Your Site
Goes "Live"
After you have uploaded your site to the Kehilalinks server and
notified the Kehilalinks coordinators that you want your site to
go "live", your work is not done! You will continue to be the web
master of your site and be responsible for making sure the links
still work, etc. Plus, you will continually come across new
material that will want to add to your site. (In fact, once your
site goes live, you'll probably get a flood of new material from
excited researchers who have been waiting for someone to create a
site for that town.)
Adding New
Material to Your Site
You can continue to update your pages and upload them to the
Kehilalinks server whenever you wish. Kehilalinks would like to be
notified when you make an update (a simple email to the coordinators
is fine: kehilahelp@jewishgen.org),
but you will already be familiar with Kehilalinks policies and will
be trusted to continue to adhere to them.
Copying your Web
Page Files to Another Computer
Over time, many of you will experience a computer "crash" or will
upgrade your old computer and want to copy your work to a new
computer. If your hard drive still works, or you have a backup, you
can simply copy the folder that contains all of your web pages and
images to the new computer. Assuming that all of the URLs to local
images and other pages in your site are relative, all of the links
will still work and you don't have to change anything. (You also
have to install SeaMonkey and FireFTP on the new computer if you
want to continue to use Composer, of course.)
If you suffered a hard drive failure and do not have a backup, but
if you have already uploaded your site to the Kehilalinks server,
you can simply download all of your files using FireFTP. There are
two arrows: the one that we've been using, which points to the
right, is for copying from your computer to the server; the other
arrow that points to the left is for copying from the server to your
computer.
If, however, you had a hard drive crash, do not have a backup, and
have not yet uploaded your pages to the server, I'm afraid you are
out of luck; you'll have to start from scratch. But, on the bright
side, you already know how to use Composer and have a good idea of
how you want your page to look, so recreating it will take much less
time than it took to create it the first time.
Other Web Page
Editing Software
Composer is a good tool for learning about how to make web pages,
and it's fine for creating and maintaining simple pages, but it
isn't very sophisticated or convenient for maintaining a large web
site. If you want to make larger and more elaborate web sites, you
will need to use a more sophisticated tool.
There are many tools out there. Some of them are free, but others
can be quite expensive. Here are some free ones that you may want to
investigate:
- KompoZer
(Windows and Macs) - KompoZer was originally based on Composer,
but has some more advanced features. It should be relatively
easy for you to figure out how to use, now that you are familiar
with Composer. I don't know that it is sufficiently advanced to
be useful to manage a large web site, however.
- Amaya
(Windows and Macs) - An open source web editor that has a lot of
advanced features. It is considerably more sophisticated than
Composer, but you've probably learned enough about web pages in
this course to be able to recognize many of the features of
Amaya.
- BlueGriffon
(Windows and Macs) - Another WYSIWYG (what you see is what you
get) editor. Uses the same web page renderer as FireFox (and
SeaMonkey), like Composer, so pages created in BlueGriffon will
look in those browsers the same as it looks in the editor.
- NetObjects
Fusion Essentials (Windows only) - A free version of
NetObjects Fusion. It is easy to use and does things like
automatically generating navigation menus and graphical
elements, such as buttons. It is a "drag and drop" editor, so
you don't even have to worry about using tables to layout your
page; the program does it for you automatically. I used an old
version of NetObjects Fusion to create the Horodenka site (http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/Gorodenka/).
Some non-free, but relatively inexpensive, other choices for Mac
users:
I didn't mention these tools earlier because I wanted you all to use
Composer. Not only does Composer work on both PCs and Macs, but it
has an integrated browser and FTP add-on that also run on both PCs
and Macs. That simplified things for me in teaching the class. Now
that we've completed the class, however, you are free to try out and
use whatever web page editing program you like best.
Assignment
Submit your site to the JewishGen coordinators (kehilahelp@jewishgen.org)
for it to go live!
Afterward
This final lesson concludes the "How to Make Kehilalinks Pages"
course. The Kehilalinks coordinators and I thank you for taking this
class and look forward to seeing your pages. Remember, don't wait
until you have something that you think is "finished" before posting
your pages. (After all, is any genealogy web site really
"finished"?) Just put up a simple page to start and improve it as
you go along.
If you found something unclear in any of the lessons, please let me
know to help me improve the course. I'll continue to monitor the
class forum for the next few weeks, in case you have more questions.
Best wishes,
-- Mark
Copyright © 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016 Mark
Heckman. All rights reserved.