“… I’m about to lose control and I think I like it”
Don’t you just love that song? Every time I hear it, I just wanna get up and dance!
Well, right now I’m singing it and dancing it and trying to type at the same time, which ain’t easy! Why am I so wound up?
I got my RootsMagic database uploaded to this hosted website all by myself, and it’s actually there for all the world to see!!!
Let me explain: when I signed up for this hosted site several months ago and moved my WordPress.com blog here as a WordPress.org blog, I also wanted my genealogy database and all of my genealogy-related images here, too.
To that end, I set up PhpGedView (actually the guys at DreamHost set up WordPress and PhpGedView. Thanks, DreamHost guys!) for my database.
Now PhpGedView is a really neat program, and I thought that I could use PhpGedView online and RootsMagic on my hard drive for my database. Only problem with that idea was that when I updated RootsMagic, then I would have to manually update PhpGedView, too. No way to synchronize between the 2 programs. So in order to keep both current, I would have to do twice the work. Kinda silly, really.
And since I have paid for my hosted site a year in advance, I don’t want to just give up on it. I want all my genealogy stuff at one site that I can control!
RootsMagic, like many genealogy database programs, can create the files and HTML necessary to build a website. You just gotta upload these files and HTML somewhere, such as RootsWeb. Piece of cake, simple directions are available in the program’s Help files.
But to upload my RootsMagic-created website to my own hosted site… well, that was a little daunting. How do I do that?
Step 1 was to log onto the C-panel of my site and create a new directory, a new folder to upload the files to. Not too difficult. Ok, next…
Step 2 was to actually upload the files. Here I ran into a problem and an error message. Do those people really speak English. Hard to tell…
Step 3 was to send a message to the DreamHost guys, asking for help. The DreamHost guy returned my email the same evening with his suggestions. That was about 10 days ago, and I have been nervously considering his advice and hoping the little WebMaster Fairy would sneak into my living room one night while I was asleep and fix everything. It works with the Tooth Fairy…
I guess I’ve been a bad little girl, ‘cuz the WebMaster Fairy never showed up!
Ok, guess I gotta figure it out myself.
The very nice DreamHost guy suggested using a different FTP program to upload my files than the one provided by DreamHost. I have used FileZilla to upload my files to RootsWeb, so I decided to give it a try for this task.
After a bit of hair-pulling over how to set up the access to my site, I finally was ready to give it a try. And to my amazement…
IT WORKED! MY ROOTSMAGIC-CREATED WEBSITE IS NOW ON MY HOSTED SITE!!!
Wanna see it? Just click on the “Database” tab at the top of this page.
