RW Websites

[Linda Lewis]

All,

I strongly recommend that everyone here download their sites as soon as possible, while FTP is working. I do not believe that Ancestry, or potential future owners, will keep Rootsweb sites online indefinitely. Nor do I believe will they be swift to any RW outage issues. 

How many of you would be willing to move your site to a new location to retain FTP access so that you can fix broken links or update contact info? 

I'm the current National Coordinator for The USGenWeb Project (https://www.usgenweb.org). We still have about 75 county sites left to re-host and I'm currently exploring options.

Thanks!

Linda K. Lewis

National Coordinator

The USGenWeb^® Project

Free Genealogy for over 25 Years!

www.usgenweb.org

 

[Roger Goodman]

Linda,

I recall that you have been associated with USGenWeb for over 20 years now.  I have a Nemaha County, KS website on Freepages (I'm not the official county rep, so I didn't post on USGenWeb when I started).  I still have a lot of tombstone photos and Census extractions on USGenWeb or Freepages, from a time before FindAGrave became a thing.

So, is there a cost for putting files on the USGenWeb servers (I seem to recall it was free, or close to free, twenty-five years ago).  What does it take to get started?

Are you looking for help in moving files from Freepages to USGenWeb, or did I misunderstand your statement about re-hosting sites?

Roger

https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~nemahaks/genealogy/

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[Mary Richardson]

Linda, I have one site and need to download it ASAP.  Then I need to find a new home for it, so I'm interested in what you may be suggesting.  If it matters, my site is a Scottish, not U.S., site:  https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~ainsty/history/index.html (aka https://sites.rootsweb.com/~ainsty/).

Thanks,
Mary Richardson

At 09:09 PM 10/26/2023, 'Roger Goodman' via RootsWeb-Website-Help wrote:

Linda,

I recall that you have been associated with USGenWeb for over 20 years now.  I have a Nemaha County, KS website on Freepages (I'm not the official county rep, so I didn't post on USGenWeb when I started).  I still have a lot of tombstone photos and Census extractions on USGenWeb or Freepages, from a time before FindAGrave became a thing.

So, is there a cost for putting files on the USGenWeb servers (I seem to recall it was free, or close to free, twenty-five years ago).  What does it take to get started?

Are you looking for help in moving files from Freepages to USGenWeb, or did I misunderstand your statement about re-hosting sites?

Roger

https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~nemahaks/genealogy/

[Linda Lewis]

Once upon a time, many USGenWeb states and counties had free hosting on Rootsweb, but those days are gone. 

Hosting is big business today, and it takes many hosting accounts to host all of the USGenWeb states, counties, towns, and special projects. Many USGenWeb members pay lots of money to keep our sites online.

- Some states have one or more hosting accounts for their state and county sites. Either the SC pays the annual renewals or the members chip in to help cover the costs. 

- A couple of individuals pay for hosting accounts to help various state and county projects that have no other option.

- Some members pay for their own personal hosting for their sites.

- We still have ~70 sites hosted on Rootweb that need to be re-hosted. Most have a place to go, but not all. 

I am only conducting a poll to see how many folks here would like to continue to maintain their sites as I explore options. 

Funding will be required to start another hosting account and keep it renewed. And, like everything else, the cost goes up annually. But there's strength in numbers. 

For example, if hosting costs $200 / yr:

- For 25 individuals, the cost would be $8 per person per year.  

- For 20 individuals, the cost would be $10 per person per year.  

etc.

[St Joseph Island Historical Society]

As our account is Canadian, would I be correct in assuming your hosting would be for US sites?

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[Roger Goodman]

Linda,

I haven't seen any followup on this - how is it going?  Any progress?

Do you need any help moving any/some sites?

I would be interested in posting my Nemaha County KS RootsWeb site, and maybe the WorldConnect database (I don't have a way to exclude the living).

Thank you,

Roger

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[Timothy Stowell]

There are a couple of folks might find space with - if your site is affiliated with USGenWeb

http://theusgenweb.org/ - has an email contact for account creation

better yet - https://usgenwebsites.org/

If not, I don't know.

Tim Stowell

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[JFlorian]

Folks,

I've been moving my GenWeb site and sites in the "freepages" area of Rootsweb.

You need to be aware of these steps::

1. Make sure you have a full copy of your website (websites) on your computer. 

 You can use Filezilla (free) to download the whole thing.

2. Contact the State Coordinator for your State and ask for space on the State's GenWeb....
OR, find a Hosting Company and obtain space.

Either way, you'll get a hosting URL and password.  You can upload files and folders 

as soon as the site is made.

3.  Don't forget, every site needs an index.html for the main site.

Every folder needs its own index.html to protect the contents.

On every index.html put links to whatever should be public in that folder.

(an index in a photos-only folder can just point back to a "main index" for that section or for the site)

4. It is best to validate your pages before uploading.  

First, fixing errors teaches you HTML codes and CSS.

Second. you'll have fewer problems with the site.

Third, it makes it easier when you add new content.  **Validate a "template" page,  Copy and rename 

that page to add new content. Revalidate because any new content can introduce errors on that page.

5. If you have a large site, don't give up.  Keep plugging away.

6. Celebrate after finishing each folder's pages.  

Tie something you want to finishing a folder. 

Want a piece of pie?  Finish the 10 pages and you'll get the pie.

Alternate brain-work with physical activity-- make a game out of the "work" you are doing.

Judy

[St Joseph Island Historical Society]

Thanks Judy.  My site does not point to index but the main page. I will attempt to fix that. Appreciate your help.

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[Dave Naylor]

Hello folks,

Something else to be aware of...

If the search engines find duplicated content on different websites they cannot determine where to send traffic and it creates major problems such as getting your old and new sites dropped from the search engines' rankings.

The correct way to move a whole website's traffic is to place a "301 Redirect" in the old site but apparently we cannot do that, it would have to be done by Rootsweb.

The alternative is to replace *every* page at your old Rootsweb site with a forwarding ("refresh") page with the wait time set to zero seconds.  This is simple to write and, even though not ideal, it can be the same for every page if it routes them all to a single page (index.html for example).  Ideally every page would route to its like-named page at the new site.  The simplest content is as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://your-new-domain/index.html" />
</head></html>

Another alternative is to place a Canonical tag into every page at your new site.  This tells the search engine that it is the page/site to use.

If you have moved to a new site I recommend that you use the Google Search Console to verify and scan your new site -- it's free!  It will at first tell you about the duplications and the need to add  canonical tags into the pages so it knows which one to use for referrals but that is because it hasn't yet overwritten the old Rootsweb data in the search engine database -- this does take time.

Hope this helps.

Happy New Year!

Cheers! -- Dave

--
David Naylor
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
< https://hotrum.ca/naylor/ >
---

[Timothy Stowell]

David,

I doubt I'm the last person to heard of a canonical tag so looking it up to see what it was, how it was used I found - https://ahrefs.com/blog/canonical-tags/

On my search engine - I can control what URLs it reviews for those who search my site(s).  What I have done, is place a file or folder of files on the new site and then go back to Rootsweb and delete the old one, changing the reference on the Rootsweb index page to show the new home and date such.  When I do a major change, I go back and tell the search engine, after the files are deleted from Rootsweb, to re-index its search, using the old and new websites.

Since today is a time of essence with 3400 files yet to review, I've spent December doing a final FTP download of sites, then compare what it shows as still on Rootsweb against what I show on the new server, copy files I don't show on the new server to a folder and then delete those left from Rootsweb as well, leaving only my index page, which I will replace with a redirect page to the index file on it's new location.

While I have seen others who had an index file in each folder, since each folder has a file in it that references the main file in that folder which may or may not have other files in the folder linking to it, I don't understand the need for such.  It almost begs for confusion having extra index files in the account.

On your code you showed - 

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://your-new-domain/index.html" />
</head></html>

where content=0  , I suppose one can modify that to say some number like 10?  I had thought of putting in a blurb, come see us at our new home before it redirects, instead of wham, here we are that a redirect would do?

My apologies if this is too long, as an instructor of things technical, I try to be thorough.

Tim Stowell

Chattanooga

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[Dave Naylor]

Hello Tim (and others),

From what I've read it appears that the search engines only update their lookup data when the redirect's time delay is set to zero seconds.  If it's set to non-zero they assume it's a temporary redirect and will keep the old site as their number one reference.

Without an index.html in each folder/directory I've had problems when going to the folder without entering a page name.  I believe this problem is caused by some hosts not permitting a home page to be specified.  Rather than research that problem I found it simpler to add an index.html that redirects  to that directory's home page.

For my old Rootsweb site I've added a redirect page for every old web page that redirects (zero seconds) to the equivalent new page at the new host site.  I wrote a simple program to generate them all and then uploaded all to Rootsweb to replace the old pages.

I keep trying different searches on Google and see that it is slowly updating the search responses and directing traffic to my new site.

I should have requested a re-crawl of my old Rootsweb site (after the redirects were uploaded) to update the search engines but unfortunately in my haste I deleted myself as the owner of that (~hotrum) site and now likely don't have time to reclaim it to authorize the re-crawl.

Hope this makes sense.

Cheers! -- Dave

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[Charles Dobie]

I've just read this thread with great interest, and probably greater confusion 😳

I'm in the situation where I can't/won't take the time to add a re-direct to the pages of my freepages websites because there are literally 1,000s of pages, and they're all manually coded.

I copied all of my freepages data into my own domains more than 5 years ago.  I see from the discussion that I should put canonical tags in the metadata of the files on my newer websites (I'm leaving the freepages sites untouched). So, one of my questions is if I add a canonical line in the header of, for instance, the index.htm file of my rcnhistory.org website, how will this let Google "know" that it is a more up-to-date version of the index.htm file in my very old version of the website on freepages? There is nothing in the canonical code that connects the two, and there must be a billion or more index.htm files on the internet.

There must be a step missing here, or maybe I shouldn't worry about it and not bother with canonical code. Yes, Google still provides links to my freepages websites, but if users do any poking around they'll soon see that the last updates were done years ago.

Thanks, Charlie Dobie.

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[Gina Heffernan]

I was under the impression that canonical tags are for pages on the same site - used when a page has been updated but the old version is kept for some reason.

[bodde...@gmail.com]

Me too.

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[jake...@aol.com]

Hi - 

Is there a site or video that can walk me through how to get my free pages.   I read how to download my rootsweb hosted website at the site below and went to the FileZilla website but do not get it from there.  I'm not savy on technology terminology so would help me to have video or images to follow along step by step.

https://support.rootsweb.com/s/article/Retiring-and-Migrating-Portions-of-RootsWeb

Thanks so much

Marilyn Jacobs

https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~urbana/genealogy/Beghtel_Oliver/Beghtel_Olivex.html

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[Timothy Stowell]

First question Marilyn is do you have the password to get into your Freepages account?  Have you updated the site since 2018 when passwords were changed?

Tim Stowell

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[Del/Kathy Sperling]

Maybe someone already helped you:

otherwise try this?  or site suggested below.    Kathy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TET-ynbmZU

Here are the instructions I received on filling out the information boxes in FileZilla

PLEASE NOTE: If your new password contains more than 10 characters, you must paste it into the FileZilla password field; do not type it in.

2. You can download the free FileZilla Client to use as your site manager, here: 

https://www.filezilla-project.org.

Make sure to download the Client and not the Server.

3. To fill in your dashboard fields:

HOST: sitesuser.rootsweb.com - make sure you put in "sites" plural - copying and pasting this sftp host link into your dashboard is ideal. 

PORT: 22
USER:

PASS: Enter your new password. NOTE: If your password contains more than 10 characters, you must paste it into the password field; do not type it in.

If you are using FileZilla, we encourage you to watch this short video that will show you how to access your site and move your files:

https://www.ancestryacademy.com/videos/how-to-connect-to-rootsweb-sites-with-filezilla

That should get you all set up and running again. Welcome back to RootsWeb!

[jake...@aol.com]

Hi - 

Thank you so much!!!    I will check these out.  I'm also thinking to contact our local genealogy organization and library.   There may be some people there who have gone through it.

Thanks again for the info.

Marilyn Jacobs

Indianapolis, IN   

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[jake...@aol.com]

Hi - 

Thank you for writing.   I think I changed it around 2018.  I just tried to change after going to the site, requesting to changed the password but when I followed the link emailed to me, I got the message there was problem with password change.  

Thanks for any help.

Marilyn Jacobs

Indianapolis, IN

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[Linda Lewis]

Roger, 

What is the URL of the current site? Pls contact me directly at webm...@cottonhills.com

[Timothy Stowell]

Marilyn,

I'm capturing your site now.  It took a tad over 2 minutes to do as it got 258 files, which includes pictures and other graphics.

I can email the files to you or put them somewhere for you to download.  You can contact me off list.

Tim

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[Timothy Stowell]

Judy,

I don't understand item # 3 about "each folder having an index file to protect it".

Protecting it from what?

I have seen sites like that which I have inherited but it seems such is open for confusion when linking new material 

as to which index file is being linked to. 

On the other hand I've also seen sites where every file in the account is in the public_html folder, which makes it a 

nightmare instead of putting like kind items together in its own folder.

Bottom line though, puting like kind pages in a folder and then referencing them from the main index file has 

worked well for me since the late 1990s.  I look at the index file of my site as the table of contents of the site linking

 to other folders like cemeteries, church records, census and so forth.  

On item #5 - I understand all too well about plugging along as I help others recover sites.  One was a site that 

needed splitting as the first person built a site covering a geographical area that combined records from 3 areas. 

Untangling that led to thousands of broken links, that nearly 3 years later I'm still plugging along on.  

Tim Stowell

On Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 12:31 AM JFlorian <cage...@gmail.com> wrote:

Folks,

I've been moving my GenWeb site and sites in the "freepages" area of Rootsweb.

You need to be aware of these steps::

3.  Don't forget, every site needs an index.html for the main site.

Every folder needs its own index.html to protect the contents.

On every index.html put links to whatever should be public in that folder.

(an index in a photos-only folder can just point back to a "main index" for that section or for the site)

[Timothy Stowell]

Dave,

In the code snippet below - what is in the head container runs the redirect?   So in one of my cases - in the old Rootsweb account in place of the current index file, one would put a new index file with that snippet of code like such:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://chenango.nygenweb.net/index.html" />

and just keep changing the URL as needed for other sites to its main index point to page, right?   Curious though the purpose of the %20 (space) and / at the end of that line before the close bracket > .?

So if a visitor to the current site at - https://sites.rootsweb.com/~nychenan/  and this 'new' index file is in place, then it would automatically go to the new site as listed above with little or no visible change noticed by the visitor.

Tim

On Sun, Dec 31, 2023 at 1:23 PM 'Dave Naylor' via RootsWeb-Website-Help <rw-webs...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Hello folks,

The alternative is to replace *every* page at your old Rootsweb site with a forwarding ("refresh") page with the wait time set to zero seconds.  This is simple to write and, even though not ideal, it can be the same for every page if it routes them all to a single page (index.html for example).  Ideally every page would route to its like-named page at the new site.  The simplest content is as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://your-new-domain/index.html" />
</head></html>

Another alternative is to place a Canonical tag into every page at your new site.  This tells the search engine that it is the page/site to use.

If you have moved to a new site I recommend that you use the Google Search Console to verify and scan your new site -- it's free!  It will at first tell you about the duplications and the need to add  canonical tags into the pages so it knows which one to use for referrals but that is because it hasn't yet overwritten the old Rootsweb data in the search engine database -- this does take time.

Hope this helps.

Happy New Year!

Cheers! -- Dave

--
David Naylor
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
< https://hotrum.ca/naylor/ >
---

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[Gina Heffernan]

You're correct in your first statement but you can leave the old index if you want, just add the meta tag to it.

The space at the end is for HTML Transitional and doesn't need to be there for the latest version of HTML. It just depends on what version you're using; the latest version will ignore it.

Gina Heffernan
Rusk County, Texas

Since you can be anything ... be kind.

Virus-free.www.avast.com

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[Pat Asher]

Tim, et al.,
The problem with creating redirects on existing pages is that we have no idea where content that is allowed to remain on https://sites.rootsweb.com will end up when Ancestry "takes over" those sites. Will they be moved to a different server/URL? Something like https://ancestry.com/rootsweb/ perhaps? Will they be presented as framed pages at an Ancestry.com address?

A redirect is an attempt to control presentation of content that may or may not work, depending on decisions made by Ancestry.com.

Pat Asher

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[Pat Asher]

It's a possibility.

Pat

On 1/3/2024 5:20 PM, Timothy Stowell wrote:

Pat,

Are you saying that if I remove my current index file after I've wiped out all the content in the account - put a pointer (redirect) in it's place, that depending on where the account ends up would control whether or not visitors actually end at the new site?

Tim

On Wed, Jan 3, 2024 at 4:19 PM Pat Asher <pjr...@att.net> wrote:

Tim, et al.,
The problem with creating redirects on existing pages is that we have no idea where content that is allowed to remain on https://sites.rootsweb.com will end up when Ancestry "takes over" those sites. Will they be moved to a different server/URL? Something like https://ancestry.com/rootsweb/ perhaps? Will they be presented as framed pages at an Ancestry.com address?

A redirect is an attempt to control presentation of content that may or may not work, depending on decisions made by Ancestry.com.

Pat Asher

On 1/3/2024 3:49 PM, Timothy Stowell wrote:

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[Dave Naylor]

Hello Tim and others trying to figure out the best steps for us to take.

Yes Tim that's the tag needed.  When that's seen/read the redirect occurs and nothing on that page after it is used.

I have a redirect in place for every one of my old Rootsweb pages which redirects to its like-named page at my new site -- a few hundred!  I wrote a simple little routine to generate them all.
I tried to tell Google Search Console that my old Rootweb site had moved but it insists on 301 redirects being placed on the old site and I couldn't find a way to bypass that step to continue.

When going to one of the redirected pages the page redirection can be seen as a brief image before the new page appears.  This was a surprise as my previous use of redirects were immediate.  However this does seem to differ slightly depending on browser and time of day.
You can see it function at my old:   sites.rootsweb.com/~hotrum/Naylor or any other page within or below ~hotrum.
 
The html code verification program that I use to check page coding insists on the space-slash ending fomat for all html tags that do not have a closing tag.  So : meta, link, img, br.

If Ancestry/RW changes all our old sites to different domains and doesn't alter our pages  then the redirects should still function.  Ancestry/RW  would need to place 301 redirects at our original domains otherwise they will lose all the remaining traffic being sent to them.

My use of page redirects is only temporary and I plan to delete everything at my old Rootsweb site after the search engines have caught-up with the move.  That's, of course, is if I still have access to them -- cannot wait too long!  Whoops! now I've told them!   :-)

Cheers! -- Dave

[Timothy Stowell]

In the FWIW category - the mailing lists that were on Rootsweb that were taken down in March 2020, are now back on line, as we were told - going to a free server offsite -

https://archive-it.org/organizations/2576   - one entry shows up for all 32,000 plus lists.  In the search box, I put the name of a list I had managed on Rootsweb - NYChenan to narrow down to that list - NYCHENAN and then in the description below that it says 'show all captures' which is just one in November 2023 but shows all the messages they had which for this particular list  was 8391 messages.

All email addresses were stripped so unless somewhere in the text of the messages someone input their address there's no way to contact anyone who posted there.

Supposition wonders now if the websites won't go there as well.

Tim Stowell

[Barry Carlson]

Tim,

Your post got caught by the Google Groups sp*m detector.  There's something you wrote which its 'AI' wasn't happy with; however, I've let it through.

Barry

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