Terry's Second Site Tips - Home Page Terry's Second Site Tips - Home Page This page updated 8 Nov 2014 Version note: Applies to Second Site 4 & 5 John Cardinal, long time TMG user and creator of several companion programs for TMG, has written a wonderful program to produce high quality web pages from TMG Project files. It's called Second Site, and you can read all about it on John's website. In it's simple-to-use default mode it produces very nice websites, and it offers seemingly endless options to customize the results for users who prefer to personalize their sites. The webpages created by Second Site can be placed on an Internet website, or they can copied to a CD or thumb drive to be shared with family members more privately. The program offers a choice of several different output formats for presenting the family history data. The one I prefer for sharing details with family members is called Narration, and produces output similar to the Journal style reports produced by TMG, but adapted to take advantage of the linking capabilities of webpages. There are also several variations using columnar formats and bullet-item formats, for those that prefer a more structured layout. I use a Bullet format for my "outline" family history webpages which I post in hopes of contacting other researchers working on the same lines. Websites can be produced in a variety of styles, called Themes in Second Site. Each Theme produces different page appearance, color schemes, and graphical treatments. Users can modify those Themes to suit their tastes, or in essence create their own "themes" entirely, thereby creating highly personalized websites. My own family history sites are examples of that capability. In addition to simply presenting the data recorded in TMG, Second Site can produce a variety of other forms of output, including ancestor and descendant charts, maps, photo galleries, DNA charts, and custom pages of the users own design. Examples of many of these can be found in my family history pages and in the illustrations in the articles listed below. I use Second Site in three distinct ways. I use it to create 1) the Outline Family History pages on my own website which is designed to reach researchers working on those people I am actively researching, 2) the much more detailed Narrative Family History pages on my website for those lines whom I have substantially completed my research, and 3) to create webpages to share privately with family members or other serious researchers. There is an abbreviated example of this more personalized style my Sample webpages. To me, these three applications require very different styles of webpages, as can be seen in those examples, and discussed in my article on Sharing. Second Site user Keith Winters has created a Gallery of Websites created with Second Site featuring over 300 sites. Viewing some of these examples will give an appreciation for the wide variety of styles that Second Site can produce. In my articles here I describe some of the features of Second Site, and some techniques I have found useful. The articles range from general information suitable for beginning users to fairly obscure techniques of interest only to more advanced users. There are articles on the following topics:
General Information Understanding and using Second Site Second Site Basics - getting started, John's "Six steps to Second Site" Overview - Understanding Themes, Layouts, and supplemental pages Publishing - sharing your site on CD or thumb drive, or on the Internet Advanced Techniques Some advanced techniques I've found useful Useful Tricks - links to people, links from people, and adding citations to text Special Issues - using Split CDs, International issues, and more Creating Virtual Sub-Sites - using Second Site to create a site with sections for each family line Using Custom Languages - a custom language can produce exactly the output you prefer Customizing Formats - when Second Site's myriad options still don't do just what you want You can also use the Search function to locate topics of interest. If you need help in finding the best way to apply the program to your application and preferences, I would suggest subscribing to John Cardinal's Second Site support list, where John and click here now other users are always ready to provide help. And don't forget to consult John Cardinal's very helpful and comprehensive Second Site website. Second Site 5 is the current version, which has a number new features and changes from the previous version. Take note of the "Version note" at the top of each article. In articles identified as applying to both Second Site 4 & 5 the features not applicable to the older version are noted. Earlier versions are no longer supported on this site, and I make no attempt to identify the many differences between them and later versions in my articles. The Second Edition of my sell-out book, A Primer for The Master Genealogist, is now available. Details are can be seen here. Copyright 2000- by Terry Reigel