Why I have moved from tribalpages.com to TNG

by Paddy Waldron

6 Aug 2013

I set up pwaldron.tribalpages.com on 24 Feb 2008 but was forced to abandon it in favour of running TNG at pwaldron.info/tng on 1 Aug 2013. I had paid my annual tribalpages.com subscription up to 29 Mar 2014 before abandoning it.

Like any genealogical work and any software project, both websites have been constantly, probably permanently, under reconstruction.

tribalpages.com has lots of advantages over other sites which display family tree databases online, including:

• password protection
• data not automatically included in search results
• interface not designed for viewing on an infinitely wide screen
• relatively keyboard-friendly
• an iPhone app
• at GBP17 for my last annual renewal, tribalpages.com works out less expensive for a beginner than TNG, which requires annual hosting fees of USD102.40 plus a once off payment of GBP22.48 for the software; but I was already paying the hosting fees for the other material on this website.

tribalpages.com also has lots of disadvantages, which ultimately outweigh the advantages:

• TribalPages.com does not display everything uploaded in a GEDCOM file:
  • NOTEs attached to FAM records are ignored.
  • OBJEs (photographs) attached to INDI records apparently have to be uploaded and reattached to the relevant individuals one by one; there does not appear to be a batch mode for doing this.
  • It appears that name prefixes and nicknames are ignored, although as far as I can see, these are allowed by the GEDCOM specification and should be displayed.
  • Approximate date ranges such as Abt 1900/1920 are truncated to Abt 1900, so tribalpages.com readers must treat any date in the format 'Abt yyyy' with extreme caution.
  • The tribalpages.com import ignores the Record Identification Numbers [RIN] in the GEDCOM input. In my notes, I often identify individuals by appending the RIN to names (e.g. P J M Waldron-1 for myself). TNG uses the RIN from AQ as its personID, making it potentially possible even to hyperlink the RINs in comments to the relevant individuals.
  • Several characters in GEDCOM files are not imported correctly by tribalpages.com. So far, I have noticed that:
    • the % symbol is converted to a <space>;
    • hyphens (-) in names are converted to underscores (_); and
    • apostrophes in names (') are converted to left quotes (').
• The hacks necessary to fix some of the above problems make things look even worse in the iPhone app, which does not parse HTML embedded in the GEDCOM file correctly.
• A TribalPages.com site is not scaleable
  • It was only from the update of 7 Sep 2009 that an increase from 10 megabytes to 20 megabytes in the free storage space provided by tribalpages.com allowed me to start including some of the notes for each individual that were previously stored offline.
  • In 2011, tribalpages.com suddenly switched off its free service for databases with more than 500 individuals, requiring me to find time to figure out how to switch to its commercial offering.
  • The next size limit that I expected to encounter is not mentioned on the tribalpages.com pricing page, but is referred to in a message dated 13 Jun of some unspecified year (2012 or earlier). The maximum GEDCOM size allowed by tribalpages.com is only 60GB, which I expect to reach some time around 2015.
  • My original notes were written without a word limit, so the online versions of a few longer ones (over 8000 words) were truncated on import to TribalPages.com, possibly in mid-sentence.

I'm sure I'll find bugs in TNG in future, but so far it seems to solve all my TribalPages.com problems.

I have introduced numerous other people to TribalPages.com over the five years plus for which I used it; those who enter their data directly on the website appear more satsified than I am, until they realise that they have to pay to back it up to an offline GEDCOM file.

In recent months, I in turn have been introduced to TNG by three satisfied users, namely Terry Fitzgerald, Bríd Talty and Aileen Wynne.

It did take several days to get everything up and running in TNG and along the way I needed a little assistance from the helpful folks at tngforum.us and at dreamhost.com.