Family Tree Maker(TM)
Warts
User Home Pages
Problems with the free online repository of home pages contributed
and maintained by individual users.
http://www.familytreemaker.com/ftm_uhp_home.html
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Create & Maintain
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One cannot replace a FTM User Home Pagewithout
changing its URL, making it impossible to code a reference
to these pages that will survive page updates.
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The link to the User Home Page Maintenance
area is labeled "Create a new home page or edit an existing
home page", but the page it brings you to has no instructions that pertain
to editing and replacing an existing page. The instruction reads
"To create your own home page, fill out the form below."
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reference
This explains why so many "hits" by search
engines (including FFR, IFF) result in "not found" errors. |
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Usability
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Outline Descendant Trees uploaded to the
FTM User Home Pages are provided with an "Index of Individuals" which lists
the first individual on each page. Since the report is not organized alphabetically,
or in any ordered fashion, this "index" is of little
practical value. In any case, the index is just plain
wrong if the person at the top of a page is a spouse. The index lists the
descendant, but that individual appears at the
bottom of the previous page!
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little
practical value
at
the bottom |
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The ridiculously long prefixes that FTM affixes
to the User Home Page Titles makes them much more difficult to use.
The portion of the title supplied by the user is relegated to the end,
where it is often truncated. For example, in the FFR, often one sees nothing
but the prefixes, with the actual titles provided by the users completely
obscured.
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 Navigation:
To get to a User Home Page one must enter the first three characters of
the surname, then pick it out of a list. What if the surname has fewer
than three characters? One might expect that a special character would
be substituted, like underscore, or asterisk. Nope. Two X's are appended.
(There are no instructions that mention this fact.) The example
is of Julie B. Hu's home page.
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completely
obscured
07MAY
1999
example
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