Photo: Ruth Ann White

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: I've not very good at the Internet. Is the Control Panel hard to use?

A: Pretty easy, actually. If you can use a web browser to, for example, buy things on Ebay or Amazon, you can use the Control Panel. If in doubt, call Steve at steve@trinidadcolorado.net or (719) 845-1424 for a guided tour of the features.

Q: I already have a website. Why would I want another one at Trinidadcolorado.net?

A: There are four main reasons:

1. Trinidadcolorado.net gets thousands of visitors each month. Most of them probably don't know about your site. If you use trinidadcolorado.net to tell them about it, some of them (maybe a lot them) will visit you.
2. Trinidadcolorado.net attracts visitors from all over the United States. Many of them are planning to visit or relocate here. They want to find you now, before they arrive. Why not make it easy for them?
3. Your website will be linked from every page at Trinidadcolorado.net. This not only makes it easy for visitors to find you, but should help your search engine rankings, too.
4. Updating your Gallery and other Trinidadcolorado.net content is easy and fast. If you have a new listing, a special, a band you've hired for next Friday night, you could have that news on the Internet five minutes from now. Updating your website probably isn't anything like that easy or quick. Plus, since you can do it yourself, frequent updates cost nothing.

Q: You let so many people post content here. How do you keep spammers away?

A: It's easier than you'd think. This is a local site for Las Animas and Huerfano Counties and we only let locals add content to it. If, for instance, a classified ad arrives with Denver or Russian contact information (if you live in Trinidad, both places seem like equally foreign countries) we just reject it, not because it might be spam, but because they live somewhere else. Bear in mind that Las Animas County is about the size of Connecticut and has 15,000 people in it. Huerfano County is smaller both in area and population. In such a community spammers and other digital bad guys stand out, sort of like the proverbial city slicker in a frontier town. It makes this site really easy (and a lot of fun) to moderate.

Q: I've just uploaded some new pictures to my gallery, but the old ones are still there.

A: There are two possible causes:

1. The old pictures are being loaded from your brower's cache. This is by far the most likely reason. Browers "cache" images and even whole pages on your hard disk so that they won't have to download the same content time after time. Sometimes they are not very smart about noticing when page content has changed, and you see the old cached image or page rather that the real one. Older versions of Internet Explorer are especially notorious for this, and newer ones aren't all that much better. First, try clicking your browser's "Refresh" button to reload the page. If that doesn't work, you may need to empty the cache. If you're using Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options. You'll find the controls under the heading "Temporary Internet Files".
2. The server, as a security measure, will not accept uploaded files larger than 1 MB. If you try to upload a larger one, you most likely won't see an error message. The upload will just silently fail. Reduce the size of the problem image with an image editor like Photoshop or Gimp (Gimp is free, open-source software. Get it http://gimp.org) and all should be well.

Q: I want to upload pictures to my gallery, but they are not in JPEG format. How can I convert them?

A: You'll need to use an image editing program such as Photoshop or Gimp. There are many such programs, both commercial and free, and any of them will work just fine.

If you don't have an image editor, consider installing the Gimp ("GNU Image Manipulation Program"), which is full-featured, robust, reasonably intuitive, and available for free under the GNU General Public License. You can get the Gimp for Windows here, for Mac OS X here, or for Linux here. You'll find an extensive manual that will teach you how to use it at http://docs.gimp.org/en/.

Basically, you can turn your GIF's and PNG's into JPG's simply by opening them in the Gimp, choosing "Save As" in the File Menu, changing the file extension to ".jpg" in the popup dialog, and clicking "Save".

Q: I composed content in my word processor and pasted it into the text boxes in my browser. Now, when I view my pages, all the quotation marks and special characters have turned into ugly little boxes.

A: You were probably using Microsoft Word, which encodes special characters in a non-standard way. The boxes are how your browser displays characters it can't understand. You'll be way better off using a plain text editor (like Notepad) instead of a word processor. If you can't stand Notepad, there are tons of better text editors available for free. If you really want to work in word processor, consider OpenOffice, which is free, full-featured, and does a better job of handling special characters correctly.

Q: I haven't logged into my Control Panel for awhile, and now things look different. What happened?

A: Trinidadcolorado.net has recently had a major overhaul. Nothing is radically different in the Control Panel, but some features have been made easier to use and several new ones added. This page has details about the changes.

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Questions? Ideas? Comments? Offers of help?
Site Administrator: steve@trinidadcolorado.net
Sales and Sponsor Support: (719) 845-1424 or steve@trinidadcolorado.net