TribalPages has added a great new feature: you can now add photos to your new site via Email! It's easy, quick and incredibly flexible. You can find instructions by logging into edit your site and going to the "Send a Photo" and look for the "Bulk Options" link.

In this five-part series of articles, we're going to look at how to make the most of this new feature to grow your family tree site here at TribalPages. In our first installment, we'll show how to enlist your entire extended family to add photos to your site without giving up the control and safety you're used to.

Understanding Photo Email Addresses

To get started, let's take a look at just how our new Photo Email Addresses work.

UPDATE: All systems are up and operational. Please bring any issues to the Technical Forum. Thank you for your patience.

Windows XP users, we have a treat for you!

One of our recent goals has been to add ways to upload many family tree photos at a time to your TribalPages site. Sending them one at a time is downright painful -- and you haven't been shy in pointing that out!

Our first tool to help solve this problem is specific to Windows XP. We'll release a second tool soon for other operating systems, but we've just finished a great beta test (many thanks to some of our high-volume users), and we're proud to be able to release our TribalPages Publishing Wizard for Windows XP.

The Publishing Wizard allows you to:

• Select many photos, or even whole directories to upload
• Resize them all at once while sending (which we love!)
• Send all of them with one click, with a great status screen as each photo gets uploaded to your site

All of this takes place from within your normal Windows XP environment, and uses standard Microsoft wizard screens: It is really, really, easy!

TribalPages is happy to announce the general availability of our new Connections Tool.

This new feature provides a simple and automated way to find new connections to other TribalPages sites.

Simply click on the "Connections" menu item (under Home) and find hundreds, even thousands of your family members that are also entered into other sites in the TribalPages Search Database. Our new Connections Tool walks through your site, checking each family member's name, birth, and death dates against millions of other entries, finding the best matches and giving you immediate contact information to help you find your fellow family historians.

TribalPages is proud to still offer completely Free Family Tree Websites. We continually improve these sites, including the recent addition of Custom Site Names, Citations, etc. The result is impressive: we now have hundreds of thousands of amateur and experienced genealogists who share their heritage using our services.

To support these sites, we rely on Advertising in the form of Image and Text Ads that are displayed on the Free Sites. We've been fairly conservative on the ads so far, and we'll continue to adhere to some guidelines about what we won't do:

• NO Pop-Up or Pop-Under Ads
• NO Floating Ads in front of Content
• NO Interstitial Ads (pages you have to click-through randomly)
• NO Ads that are explicit or inappropriate (especially to minors)

However, with our recent growth, we now have a very large, very targeted audience, and we'd like to better match them with our potential advertisers. (It is, in fact, the only way to ensure we can always host free sites.)

We have added the ability to add "Events" to each name in your tree.

You can use the Event functionality to add information about the life of the person in your tree: when they were Christened, when they Graduated, etc. You can also use it as a marker for important items you find, like a Census record that shows where they were at a particular date.

We're thrilled to announce Custom Website Addresses for all of our members!

That means that all of our customers can now visit their site by going to http://username.tribalpages.com where username is your login id.
For example, in the past, if you wanted to visit the 'royal' test site, you would enter 'royal' in the User ID: box on the front page. Now, you could simply visit http://royal.tribalpages.com. You can email that URL to friends and family, post it on blogs, etc.
Here are some common questions and answers that came up during testing:

Tampa, FL (PRWEB) January 30, 2007 -- TribalPages is now providing a Custom Website Address for each of it's 125,000 members. These new URLs, in the form http://username.tribalpages.com provide a simple new means for TribalPages members to share their family tree websites while keeping the security and privacy TribalPages is known for.

Originally slated to be a paid feature, TribalPages has opened up the custom addresses to all of its members, free and paid alike. "When we saw the response to the initial testing, we knew we had to make this standard," explains Vandana Rao of TribalPages, "The sense of ownership is immediate--it really makes the website feel like it's yours. You can publish the site to your blog, email it to your family, or even put it on your Christmas cards and stationary. All without worrying about whether your family can figure it out."

We've added a new feature to the Photo Editing section of your sites. On each page where you can add, remove, or edit your photos, we've placed a graphical indicator of how much of your photo space you have used.

Here is an example:

We hope this helps you track your usage and prepare for space issues before they occur.

TribalPages has added several Web Feeds to our site, taking our first steps into the RSS syndication space.  Given how well our initial testing is going, we'll probably introduce additional RSS feeds in the future, so we thought a brief introductions was in order.

First, here's a run down of our current RSS feeds:

• News - the most recent items in our News Section.
• Genealogy Feed - the recent items in our Genealogy Forum
• Technology Feed - the recent items in our Technology Forum
• Combined Forum Feed - All of the recent items from both forums combined into one convenient feed

Here's what they're good for...