Lots of publishing news this week – from Google+ updates to Flipboard magazines to the rumors that Yahoo! wants to buy Tumblr. You’ll also find plenty of creative ideas. If you aren’t a subscriber, you can see this week’s edition online.
Thoughts on Google +
I am fascinated with the possibilities that Google + and Hangouts offer the genealogy community. And, with the new mobile apps things are getting even better. Hangouts gives us all the flexibility of Apple’s FaceTime but without the only-Apple-devices limitations. I am especially fascinated with the Communities feature and the potential they offer. Pat and Russ are the pioneers in this area with the DearMYRTLE community. There’s a lot to be learned from their examples – and their always informative Hangouts on Air.
I’ve noticed a RootsMagic Users community along with communities for African-American Genealogy, Cemetery Photography, Evidentia users and Civil War Research. I find these focused communities much more interesting than the generic genealogy or family history ones. Right now I belong to the Evernote community which is very informative, but I have to wade through a lot of things that don’t apply to my use of Evernote to find each nugget I can use. Having an Evernote in Genealogy community would put the focus closer to my needs while still being broad enough to cover any number of genealogical uses. So I built it.
If you’re using Evernote as a research tool, I hope you will join us at Evernote in Genealogy and share your experiences, tips and best practices.
I’m also looking forward to discovering even more topic-focused communities in genealogy and family history. This could get very interesting (and useful) very quickly.
Getting Organized in Flickr
I’m a big fan of Flickr. Not only is it a great place to share photos, it’s a very affordable option for a photo archive. For $25/year, you can upload all the photos you want – at their original resolution. You determine who can view any or all of them and Flickr provides some very nice tools to organize and document them. And, those images are safely tucked away in an online archive should a disaster destroy the originals stored in your home/computer.
Flickr has several methods for uploading photos to your online collection – all of them quite easy. In this article, I’m going to demonstrate the how to best use the free Flickr Uploadr desktop app [Win & Mac]. The app looks and functions the same whether you working on a Mac or a PC.
Here you see the empty screen waiting for me to add photos. You’ll notice I’ve already connected the app to my Flickr account. I did this once and the app remembers me from then on. To add photos, I can drag and drop the files onto the uploader or click the Add button and use my system’s file manager to find the photos I want. Each one added appears as a thumbnail in the app.
Need to rotate a photo or two? No problem. I just select its thumbnail and then click the arrow key to rotate it until it’s upright. Also visible at the top of the screen is the size of this photo batch. In this case, these 11 photos come to a total 42.3MBs. This is important for users with free Flickr accounts. Free accounts have a 300MB/month upload limit. Pro accounts don’t have a limit.
Next I’m going to select all of the images and choose the metadata settings that will apply to all. You see the metadata fields on the right. The settings I choose will be assigned to each selected image. I’ve set the permissions level for who can see these photos, added tags (keywords) common to them all, chosen the safety level, content type and added the sets where these photos will be placed. Sets are organizational elements within Flickr. You might want to think of them as albums. I can choose the set (or sets) by clicking the plus sign in front of the title. My selections appear on the right. If there isn’t an appropriate existing set, I can create a new one by clicking the button and entering the name for the new set.
When I enter tags for my photos, I think of the keywords I would use to search for a photo such as this one. In Flickr, multi-word tags must be enclosed in quotation marks.
Now I can select each photo individually and add the metadata unique to it – usually titles and descriptions but maybe some additional tags too. Once all this is done, I click the Upload button and the app will do the rest. If I’m uploading a large batch, it can take some time to complete. The app displays the progress as it works and lets me know when it’s finished.
I can do all these tasks from within the Flickr platform, but it’s slower when working online because I have to wait for screens to refresh. And, since my first priority is to upload the images so there’s a off-site backup of these photos, I’m often uploading “raw” (unedited) images. In those cases, I upload them as private (for my eyes only) and then change that setting once I’ve had a chance to review, edit, cleanup, delete, whatever.
Flickr is a very affordable off-site archive solution for the family historian, but that’s just the beginning. There are many useful, fascinating and fun things you can do with your photos using Flickr. Stay tuned . . .
Moving Away from Free
With the demise of the Posterous blog platform thanks to a sellout to Twitter and Google Reader’s upcoming shutdown, I’m beginning to realize how dangerous free services can be. When you are a paying customer, you have clout. If you’re not happy it’s going to impact the business’s profits and they are going to work hard to keep you – and your money – happy. In the tech world, startup services and platforms often begin with free features. They could have a plan for generating revenue – maybe with a premium service in addition to the free one – or they may just want to get popular enough to attract a buyer. Generally, we (the users) don’t have a clue what their plan is and should remain wary. Even the big guys like Google will pull the plug on a popular service like Reader when they want to point you to a different service. So what if they lose a few (thousand) free customers?
That being said, I’m a firm believer that competition and profit are great motivators. I’ve spent the $5 to reserve an account at Posthaven and I’m amazed at the effort they have made to give us Posterous users a safe alternative. The data migration effort alone was huge! As soon as the email posting and distribution features are functional, $60/year will be a small price to pay to get our family’s private “news service” up and running again. The fact that I can have 9 additional blogs as part of that price is very nice – and will likely be put to good use – but it’s knowing that the developers will do everything they can to keep the platform up, running and well-maintained that is the top of my priority list.
There’s a lot of effort underway to develop alternatives to Google Reader. I have been using the Reeder apps [Mac & iOS] and they are working hard to provide multiple alternatives for managing feed subscriptions and keeping everything in synch across the apps. They have a couple of solutions in place on the iPhone app – both of them requiring a paid subscription. Until the Mac and iPad apps are updated with alternative solutions, those apps are free in the App Store. I’ve paid the $2 to try the iPhone app with Feedbin and so far it works great. The iPhone app even lets me choose which feed service (Google’s still there for now) I want to use. Feedbin also has a web-based reader so it should soon be covering all my reading options. Feedbin’s subscription management is still a bit clunky, but I’m sure that will improve as their customer base grows. I wouldn’t be surprised to see other feed management options appearing either.
With Google out of the market, there’s money to be made in the news-reading business and I think we’re about to have a number of impressive options. Moving away from free could turn out to be a very good thing.
Scrapshot: Creating Atmosphere
Using a photo to add atmosphere to a story. (Click to view full size.)
Here’s a situation where I had no supporting images for the story. So, I used a current photo of a shrimp boat coming through the bridge. I then used an app [SketchMee for Mac - $7.99] to convert the photo to a monochrome (sepia) sketch. I did this for two reasons. First, the story is set back in the 1950s so the sepia image gives it a bit of a vintage feel, and second, using a monochrome color scheme reduced the contrast between the sky and the clouds – making it easier for the text to stand out. The font used in this example is Jayne Print.
Cousin Friendly Publishing
When you go to the Lulu.com bookstore and search for the term “genealogy”, you’ll get almost 3,000 results. A search for “family history” gives you more than 5,000. There are tons of genealogy and family history books in Blurb, Scribd, Smashwords and any of the other self-publishing platforms. These could be amazing resources for family history research except for one thing. After all the hard work and effort researching, writing and producing these publications, many of the authors can’t seem to find the energy to provide the descriptive information we need to find them.
As I search these platforms for publications to add to Moultrie Creek Books, it’s not unusual to find a title like A Family History or The Smith Family. Then you look at the book’s description and find something like “The history and genealogy of the Smith family.” All of these platforms offer plenty of space to include descriptive information, tags, keywords and categories yet for the most part, those areas are pitifully empty. All of this metadata is searchable and can help your research cousins find your work – and you – but only if you use it.
How do you help them find you? Take advantage of the description, tags and keywords fields to list surnames, locations, date ranges and any of the search terms you would use to find information about your family. The description can be used to define exactly which branch of the Smith family (descendants of John Smith of Smithville, Illinois) your book documents. The more information you provide, the more likely you’re research cousins will find you.
Lastly, don’t forget to let me know that you’ve published a family history. I would like nothing better to add your book to a shelf at Moultrie Creek Books. I’m working to make it THE place to find great family stories, but I need your help.
How to follow a Twitter list
We all know how well Twitter lets us keep up with friends and family, but did you know how useful Twitter is for news? Twitter lets users organize the people and organizations they follow into lists. These lists can then be used to create topic-specific news feeds. The @genBUZZ user offers several genealogy-related lists providing a sort of genealogy version of the Associated Press. The @genBUZZ lists let you follow (keep up with) specific topics that match your interests. For example, there’s a list for archives, another for old photographs and another for society news.
This is all well and good, but just how do you keep up with the topic of your choice? To do that you need to know how to follow a list.
View the list page of any Twitter user.
If you know the username for a person or organization, you can easily visit their list page using this URL: https://twitter.com/[username]/lists. So, https://twitter.com/genbuzz/lists will display the page you see above. Scroll through the lists and when you see one you find interesting, click on the list title to display its page.
From here you can see samples of the tweets being feed by this list as well as the Twitter users who make up the list. If this is a list you want to follow, just click on the Subscribe button and it’s added to your Twitter feed. You don’t have to follow a Twitter account to follow one or more of its lists.
While you can “read” the list in your favorite web-based twitter app, there’s a growing number of mobile device apps which will turn that 140 character tweet into a delightful reading experience. Probably the best of these is Flipboard [iOS & Android - free]. It supports Twitter lists as well as searches. Once you have followed a list in your Twitter account, it appears in Flipboard under Accounts > Twitter > Lists You Follow. All you have to do is tap the list name to add it as a Flipboard content section.
Build a Flipboard Magazine
If you aren’t already familiar with Flipboard, it’s an amazing app for your iOS or Android tablet that will turn all kinds of news feeds into a beautiful magazine-style reading experience. You will find a huge selection of fascinating news sources ready and waiting for you to choose from or you can create your own custom news service by connecting to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, Google+ and many other social networks to follow their latest updates.
The DIGITAL Storytelling magazine on Flipboard.
A recent Flipboard app update gives every Flipboard user the ability to create and share their own magazine on Flipboard. It lets you collect content from across the Web and organize it within your magazine’s news stream. This is not a magazine that’s “published” one issue at a time. Instead, this is a streaming magazine that is constantly being updated with the content you select. Here’s how you can build your own magazine in Flipboard using your iPad.
The bookmarklet mentioned in the video, as well as a Chrome extension, can be found on the Flipboard support page for magazines. Now here’s the video showing Android users how to create magazines.
But that’s not all! Flipboard just released a web-based magazine editor that gives you even more control over your magazines. It lets you edit the magazine’s profile, change the cover page, rearrange the order of articles collected in the magazine by dragging and dropping them, and even delete articles you don’t like. You’ll find the editor at http://editor.flipboard.com and once you’ve logged in using your Flipboard account, you’ll be ready to work. This video gives you a tour of the editor and how you can use it.
My magazine focuses on my favorite topic – DIGITAL Storytelling. I’ve found several other genealogy topics which you’ll find in the gallery display below. The easiest way to find these magazines is to use the search bar on your Flipboard home screen and search for the title or topic that interests you. As you already know, the genealogy community is creating a massive amount of online content. Flipboard magazines give us the opportunity to build focused magazines covering all kinds of genealogy topics like archives, apps, photo restoration, preservation, research . . . Not only would it make it easier for readers to get information on a specific topic, it would give the content creators additional, well-deserved attention.
This could get real interesting real soon!
Pixelmator Update – Getting in Shape!
It’s all about shapes in the latest update from Pixelmator [Mac - $14.99], the awesome photo editor for Mac. The Smart Shapes tool lets you quickly create and adjust shapes, including converting text to a shape. Theres more than 100 other improvements and new features including Color Popovers – quicker access to color swatches. Existing users get the update for free. New users can take advantage of the $14.99 promotional price while it lasts.
Here’s a look at what you can do with shapes and Pixelmator.
Ephemera Graphics from Family Treasures
One of the newsletter templates included with Apple’s Pages word processing application.
I often write about using your own family ephemera to create custom graphics for your family history projects. The other day I was cruising the newsletter templates in Pages and stumbled onto this one.
Isn’t it stunning? With the addition of one or two vintage fonts, this could be the perfect template for any number of family history projects. Take a closer look at the graphic elements used in the design – a sheet from an old lined stationery pad, some old stamps, a torn and crumpled scrap of paper and a manila tag. Chances are good you have similar things in your family archives. Why not put them to use?
There are a couple of scanning and editing tricks you can use to create your own library of ephemera graphics. Using your family ephemera as design elements in your family history adds a personal touch to your projects that more than compensates for the effort involved in creating them. Not only do you save money by doing it yourself, you’re in control of the legal rights to your work and can use it wherever you want. Here’s how I do it . . .
Scanning post card with blue background.
I keep sheets of colored card stock handy when I’m scanning. They serve several uses. I learned early on that the white background found on the lid of most flat-top scanners isn’t always your friend. When you scan newspaper clippings or letters written on both sides of thin papers, you’ll often have the print on the back side bleed through on your scanned copy. Placing a light or medium gray sheet of card stock over your scanned piece will prevent the bleeding. When scanning items for design elements, use a color that contrasts with the item you’re scanning. In my example, I’m scanning the back of an old post card that has aged to a nice sepia color. I’ve chosen a blue background because there’s no blue elements on the card.
Notice that I’ve selected to scan an area just a bit larger than my post card. Yes, the card isn’t straight, but it’s faster to fix it in my photo editor than to fuss with it on the scanner. I’m using Photoshop Elements in these examples and scanning this item directly into the app. Once the scanning is complete, I’ll be ready to start editing.
Here you can see that I have straightened the postcard and used the Magic Wand selection tool (arrow points to it in the toolbar) to select the blue background. Often colored stock isn’t one flat color and you either have to adjust the Magic Wand tool’s tolerance setting or select multiple times to get all the background selected. Once it’s all selected, choose the Edit > Cut command (Ctrl/X or Cmd/X keystrokes) to remove the background. You now have a transparent background.
My next step is to crop the image down as close to the postcard’s actual edges as possible. Most of these old pieces no longer have straight edges so you’ll probably have some of the transparent background in your final piece. In my case, however, I have another problem to fix. There’s a shadow line that runs across the top of my card because it wasn’t sitting totally flush on the scanner bed. By zooming in close, I can again use the Magic Wand to select and cut it out too.
Zoom in and use Magic Wand to select the shadow line.
Once you’ve removed all the unnecessary background, save your graphic file. I will save it in Photoshop format for any later editing I might wish to perform and in .png format for use in projects. Unlike .jpg, the .png format supports transparency so you can often just dump the graphic into your project and keep on going. In more complex designs, like collages, you may have to go back to the Photoshop file and select/copy/paste just the image into your creation.
I now have a beautifully-aged blank post card back that can be used for journaling, titles or as part of a collage in any number of projects – from documents to scrapbooks to slide shows to movies.
Try it yourself. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
