There are hundreds of webmasters that have their rail related websites hosted on the TrainWeb.org web server. Several new web accounts are added to TrainWeb.org each month. Most of these new webmasters have no problem getting their websites up and running.

However, there are a few webmasters from time to time that have difficulty getting their new website at TrainWeb.org working. The problems are usually related to using FTP properly to access and upload files to their websites.

Often, when they upload their files, they fail to delete the default index.html file that we have provided and have not renamed their own main page to index.html (or index.htm). Another common problem is that they fail to upload all of their .jpg and .gif files, or the links in their .HTML files continue to refer to the .jpg and .gif files on their own local PC hard drive. This tends to mystify them since their website looks fine on their local PC, but doesn't work after they have uploaded it to their web account. A more rare problem is that the uppercase/lowercase names of their links don't match the uppercase/lowercase names of their .HTML files or there are spaces in the middle of their link and file names. These naming methods might work fine on their local PC and on Microsoft based webservers, but they do not work on Linux based webservers which are case sensitive and don't allow blanks in the middle of file names. There are other technical problems that these webmasters run into when creating their new websites at TrainWeb.org, but most of them could be diagnosed and fixed by other webmasters that have enough technical expertise to have successfully gotten their own website working at TrainWeb.org.

Even though most of these problems are easy to detect and fix, the small TrainWeb technical staff is already stretched beyond its limits. It usually takes us weeks to answer e-mails from these webmasters. We just don't have the time to analyze what each webmaster is doing wrong and explain how to fix the problem. That is why we need your help.

We would like to have a list of webmasters that have successfully gotten their websites operating on the TrainWeb.org web server and would be willing to volunteer some of their time to help those that are having a problem with their new web sites. We expect that most help will be done via e-mail. We will not publish the list of e-mail addresses of these volunteers. Rather, we will provide the list of e-mail addresses to each webmaster that requests help from us.

If you would be willing to volunteer some of your time to help other TrainWeb.org webmasters, please click here to send e-mail to me. Be sure to mention your www.trainweb.org/... web address, e-mail address, name, city & state, which FTP software you use, which web design software you use, and what type of computer you use (PC or MAC). We will try to match up webmaster problems with volunteers that have a similar combination of software and hardware.

Thank you for your interest in helping other webmasters get their new rail related websites up and running at TrainWeb.org! Your continued participation at TrainWeb.org is greatly appreciated!