We have had a web site for about two years. The first year we were at http://www.tbos2cla.com/tpcug. Boy, that was always a mouth full. The site was provided free by member John Meroth under a dial-up and web hosting service he was running in conjunction with his programming services. John’s untimely death about a year later forced us to look for another hosting service. Member Larry Anders stepped in quickly and said we could occupy without charge unused space on a site he was running. Thus, we were up and operating within a day or two under our new URL, http://www.canx.com/tpcug.

Our web site will soon be into its third year, and we have moved again; this time under a URL that should not change—TPCUG.ORG. If, in the future, we should change hosting services, we will take our URL with us. At this point I should thank Vice President Mike Hodges for getting us a good deal (not free) on our new web site from Long Bay Communications and thank Larry for his year of hosting us.

One of our requirements for a web hosting service was that they provide Microsoft FrontPage Extensions so that I could use the full functionality of Microsoft FrontPage in maintaining our web site. The new host provided this, but things did not get implemented correctly on the first try. So I had to republish our files (about 9.4 MB worth) to their server a second time. It them took them a couple of days to work out a few more problems on their end before all the FrontPage features like hit counters, the Discussion Group, and the Site Search functioned properly.

SEX Everything is now working smoothly, but one of the glitches in the beginning was quite amusing. I wanted to look up an article on the software package GoldMine that was in the newsletter last year, so I went to the local site search link on our main page and entered that text. To my surprise, in addition to the local article, it also produce several articles that were not at our site concerning financial investment topics. Obviously something was wrong.

As a test, I searched for a word that I knew there was little of at our site—SEX. And I found about ten links to sex sites (would you like to buy some sex toys?) which were listed as having URLs under TPCUG.ORG. Clearly something was wrong with the server settings. I copied these links and sent them to several members and the people in charge of the server. The members had a chance to try them for themselves before things were corrected at the server. After things were put right, one of the members sent me a message wanting to know if I could make the links work again!

LAMARTIN.COM After moving our web site to its new location under our own domain name, I began to think. For quite some time I have wanted (and really needed) a place on the web where I could try out my own ideas and interests separate from what I do with the group’s web site. My ISP, NetCom provides me a free one MB of space for a site with less than one MB of allowable traffic a month, and I have used it as a place to test ideas out for myself and during our Internet SIG. However, one MB is nothing in the scheme of things I was envisioning.

Of course, there are all of the free hosting services like GeoCities, where you get a moderate 10 MB of space and your site is placed in a "neighborhood". I think this works quite well for some people. Of course, they must tolerate advertising banners at their site. GeoCities does not support FrontPage, though. I believe I did find a free site (with advertising) that would give you a FrontPage site. I don’t remember the specifics. I do recall, as is the case with all the free sites, that you couldn’t have your own domain name there.

I did a good bit of research and finally thanks to some information someone posted in the Microsoft FrontPage Usenet newsgroup, I came up with a hosting service from Canada that gave me the kind of deal I wanted. FrontPage support, a lot of disk space, and a professionally run hosting service responsive to email inquiries and at a low price.

I am supposed to demonstrate how to create a genealogy home page and site at the next meeting of the Genealogy SIG, which will actually be a combined meeting of the Genealogy SIG and Internet SIG this month. Between now and then I hope to flesh out the genealogy section of my new site. Much of the textual material I want to add needs to be polished before I put it on the web. In fact some of what is there right now, the generation reports on various lines, needs work, but I wanted to have something there so I went with what was easy for the time being.

I have lots of old photos I want to add as time permits—both places and people. There is also a tremendous amount of genealogical material to be added—a fair amount of it not even in the computer yet. Eventually I want to be able to link names in the text to photos of the particular individual. This would primarily be photos of people now deceased. The living may not like having their photos broadcast all over the world. Of course I could have a private area, not accessible to the general browser, where "family" photos were stored.

Then there are the additional items I would like to feature, like some of the Visual Basic Programs I have written or might write in the future. I could put the installable package there for downloading with the idea of enticing people to beta test it for me. Now, if I could just figure how to get people to pay for downloading the finished product. Additionally I could place sample VB code there for members of our VB SIG to download and work with. However, the TPCUG web site would probably be a better place for that.

Visual Basic problems What would a month be without computer problems. Then I would have very little to write about. The most bothersome problem this past month was a Visual Basic Control that I couldn’t use for about 24 hours. The problem started when I noticed that the common dialog control produced an error when I pressed F1 to get help on it. The error message indicated that it was looking for a file that had a 98 attached to it. Suddenly it came to me, I had installed a VB program written by someone else recently that was written in VB 6. This program probably installed the VB 6 version of the common dialog control, and it wanted version 6 help. And that is why when I now wrote a VB program on my desktop and transferred it to the laptop, the common dialog control wouldn’t even install there—it was looking for version 6 of the control, but version 5 was all that was on the laptop.

Well, I had to put a stop to this, so I just copied version 5 of the comndlg.ocx from the laptop to the desktop, replacing the problem version 6 one. That should fix things. Unfortunately things were now worse. Now instead of not having a help topic on the control, I had no common dialog control at all. Uninstalling Visual Basic, additionally deleting the comndlg.ocx, and reinstalling VB produced no solution. Following the instructions in Microsoft’s Knowledge Base to download and run a program that was supposed to fix problems with improperly installed controls didn’t improve things. It appeared that the only sure way I could see to solve the problem was to wipe my hard drive clean. But I have a general rule of never doing that unless I can not work my way out of the problem in several days of hard thinking. As a point of interest I have not had to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows on this computer in the two years I have had it.

The problem, I decided, was a registry problem. VB had stored in the registry that version 6 was the correct version for the control, and since VB 5 did not have this version, the control could not be installed. To correct this, I opened the VB project file containing a common dialog control, got the number assigned to it, F9043C88-F6F2-101A-A3C9-08002B2F49FB, searched the registry for this number, and deleted all references to a version 6 whenever I encountered them. Problem solved. Subsequently, I think I could have more easily solved the problem by uninstalling VB and then running RegClean to remove left over information about VB in the registry that the uninstall didn’t remove. u