On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 6:36 PM, Denny Shirer <drdx(a)neo.rr.com> wrote:
Don't know if anyone else still on Rootsweb is having this
problem or if
anyone has actually tried to change their masthead banner to the
USGenWeb version but I followed their directions to change the masthead
to a tee and it still didn't work. Contacted the Help desk and they
fixed it and I know what the problem was but am not sure if anyone else
would be able to figure this out. I'm a retired programmer and it
slipped by me so I'm sure others may be confused.
Rootsweb says to create a file called "banner_select" (without the
quotes) which is an ascii text file. When you save it do not give it an
extension. If your text editor insists, go in after saving and delete
the extension. The file should only have the word "USGENWEB" (again
without quotes) in it and nothing else.
I did this double checking that it was exactly what they wanted and
added it to my base directory on my website. Didn't work. When they
wrote back they said they went in and went to the end of line and hit
delete a few times and it worked. "USGENWEB" is 8 characters so the file
should only be 8 characters in length. Windows file utility does not
display any size under 1K so you would have to use your FTP program or
some other program to check size. This I didn't do and didn't think I
had to. 8 bytes is 8 bytes right? Wrong. Even though I only had eight
bytes in the file, it was 10 bytes on my computer. The file they changed
was 8 so it worked. I checked both files against each other in text and
hex mode and they were identical but one was 8 bytes, the other 10.
Nothing I could do would get rid of that extra byte so. I use a
professional programming editor (multi-edit) and never had this problem.
I just tried creating a file with notepad and after saving it was 8
bytes. A new file created with my editor exactly the same was 10 bytes.
I'm not sure anyone else will have this problem but I thought I would
relate it in case anyone else can't get it to work. I asked Rootsweb to
amend their directions to include that the size of the file should be
the same size as the number of characters in it. If it isn't there will
be a problem.
Sorry for the long post but I didn't want anyone else to find a reason
to get upset with Rootsweb as it wasn't their fault.
I had no problem at all -- make sure you have no file extension in
your file manager.