Moultrie Creek Press

Managing four blogs can be quite a chore and I find it’s taking more and more time away from the things I really like to do – like family research, photography and writing. So, I’ve decided to do a bit of simplification and consolidation and the result is Moultrie Creek Gazette. The Gazette is one blog organized in magazine style with sections instead of separate blogs. Each section has its own character, which I hope to expand as the site develops.

At the moment, all of the content is consolidated in one RSS feed, but the plan is to offer optional feeds for each section. You can also subscribe to Moultrie Creek Gazette by email and you’ll find publication announcements on Moultrie Creek’s Facebook page.

This move is still a work in progress and you will see some of my favorite posts show up as reruns as I consolidate the content at the Gazette. The old blogs will stay up until that effort is completed.

Leading, a term that goes back to the days of typesetting, is the space between one line of type and the next. Originally a strip of lead was placed between each line of set type to provide that spacing. These strips varied in width to compensate for the different type sizes. Today, we use the term “linespacing” and our word processing applications provide the capability to control it. Most linespacing is adjusted automatically. Your word processor adds linespacing in proportion to the font size. But, you also have the ability to manipulate it manually.

There are times when the manual settings can come in quite handy. That letter that spills over into a new page by just two lines can be condensed to one page with a tiny linespacing adjustment. In the example below (Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac) you can see the first paragraph has been set to 0.8li – or 8/10th of a single-spaced line for that font. The paragraph is more difficult to read because the lines are so close together. You can make very small adjustments – 0.95li for example – which will give you the space you need to squeeze those two extra lines in your letter without appearing obviously squished.

There are times when readability can be improved by adding a smidgen of extra linespacing. This is especially true with smaller font sizes. And, since the height of a font includes characters with ascenders (like the “h” or “b”) and descenders (like the “g” or “p”), multiple lines of all caps can be improved by reducing the linespacing to compensate for the lack of them.

Now that you know what linespacing is and how easy it is to use, you’ll find many situations where it will improve the appearance of your publication. Soon, you’ll be wondering how you ever survived without it.

More Civil War history from ManyBooks.net, ‘Co. Aytch’ – Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment: or, A Side Show of the Big Show by Sam R. Watkins was originally published in 1882. There are several reviews of this book with a four-star rating. This public domain ebook is available for download in a number of formats.

Although iBooks is a gorgeous book reader, downloading public domain books (or any book outside of the iTunes bookstore) can be a challenge. I do miss the Stanza book reader (review at Family Matters) which is still MIA for the iPad with its connections to several online public domain collections. Fortunately, I recently discovered BookShelf [iPhone/Touch/iPad $3.99]. Although not free, this reader is quite amazing.

BookShelf can read a large number of ebook formats including epub, MobiPocket, PalmDoc, HTML, plain text, rich text, PDF, Microsoft DOC and more. Digitally Restricted Media (DRM) is not supported. Finding and downloading these books is a breeze. The catalog page provides direct access to Project Gutenberg, Internet Archives, Feedbooks, ManyBooks.net, Smashwords and Baen WebScription Catalog. And, you can download books directly from the web or move them from your computer using Dropbox. It doesn’t get much easier than this.

But there’s more!

You can change font style and size, set color themes for your pages, choose settings like justification, line spacing and paragraph spacing to customize your reading experience. You can also download additional libraries and set scrolling options. You control what your pages look like and how you interact with the reader. One interesting note – unlike most book readers where pages are “turned” horizontally, BookShelf scrolls vertically. Tapping the bottom third of the screen pages to the next screen or tap at the top to go back a screen. You can scroll manually by brushing your finger up or down the screen and you can turn on auto-scroll.

BookShelf provides a delightful reading experience and makes it easy to find books from any number of sources. If you want freedom of choice, BookShelf provides that – and much more.

From ManyBooks.net, another public domain unit history from the Civil War – The Fourth Massachusetts Cavalry: in the Closing Scenes of the War for the Maintenance of the Union, from Richmond to Appomatox by Edward T. Bouvé. This ebook can be downloaded in any number of formats.

I love ebooks. And, with the release of Apple’s iPad, ebooks have gotten even better. The iBooks reader displays the book beautifully and includes images and graphic elements better than any book reader I’ve seen so far.

BUT . . .

In order for electronic books to really be successful, we need the virtual equivalent of the Little Shop Around the Corner. I would love to see an “independent” bookstore designed to make you comfortable the moment you arrive. It would provide descriptions, reviews and online conversations for each book and links to the various online sellers (both print and ebook versions) as well as World Cat (for finding libraries) and Project Gutenberg (public domain versions).

Barnes & Noble online has the best browsing experience. While I’m often looking for a particular book, mostly I’m looking for inspiration. B&N does that very well. I also like their “studio” area where I can view interviews with authors and the “book clubs” with discussions on specific books and blogs for book categories that coordinate with Twitter updates. It’s a great browsing experience. One other very nice thing about B&N ebooks is that you can lend your books to others. The other person needs a device or computer with the B&N Reader application installed. This is a delightful feature and so far B&N is the only one offering it.

Right now there’s sort of a price war going on in the ebook arena. No, it’s not Amazon against Barnes & Noble or now Apple, but rather the publishers pushing the retailers. At the moment, the consumers are being left out of the equation – not a smart move in my opinion. The world of ebooks is upsetting many of the time-tested ways of doing things (sound familiar) and retailers have adjusted better to the changes than publishers – so far. We consumers will express our opinions with our wallets. It will take some time for things to settle, but I’m already enjoying the delights of reading ebooks. Now, I’m looking forward to the creation of online bookstores in all kinds of niche markets – like maybe genealogy and family history? Hmmmm…

When it comes to building a photo archive, nothing beats Flickr. Flickr has set the bar by collaborating with a growing number of public archives to make their photographic collections more accessible. The Commons at Flickr hosts collections from The Library of Congress, Smithsonian Museum, George Eastman House, the British National Maritime Museum, the National Archives of the U.S., the Netherlands and the U.K, libraries from Australia and New Zealand and many more.

Why do these archives post their content at Flickr? For one reason it is a very search-friendly platform and by taking advantage of the options for including metadata, each image is even more searchable. In addition, viewers are encouraged to add comments about the images which have added to the knowledgebase about those photos.

You can get started in Flickr with a free standard account. With this you can upload 100MB of photos per month (maximum of 10MB per photo). Although your storage isn’t limited, your photostream only displays the 200 most recent uploads and you are also limited to 10 groups. A pro account costs $24.95 a year and removes all upload and storage limits. You do have a 20MB size limit for each image. Because you can determine the privacy settings for each photo, it is a very cost-effective way to build a personal archive of the images you wish to display and maintain a private archive of your entire photo collection which also serves as a backup.

The free desktop uploader application (Windows and Mac) found on the Tools page makes it easy to upload large numbers of photos along with the necessary indexing information. There’s a growing number of widgets, plugins and applets which allow you to display selected photos on your blog site, Facebook page and any number of other social systems. Of course there’s tons of third-party sharing opportunities, from Lulu calendars to Moo cards to photo gifts.

When building a personal photo archive in Flickr, take advantage of the sets and collections features to organize your photos. Sets are the primary organizational feature, with multiple sets making up a collection. Look at the Library of Congress’ photostream and you will see there are two collections – Historic Newspapers and Historic Photos. As shown above, the Historic Photos collection contains 11 sets. Each set covers photos of a specific topic – Baseball, World War I and Abraham Lincoln are three of them. You can create a new set as part of an upload operation or add your uploaded photos to an existing set.

Each set has its own page with thumbnails of each photo in the set and room to describe the set’s contents. You choose which photo will be the focus photo for the set and can arrange the order for each photo within the set.

Each individual photo also has its own page with description, metadata and user comments. In this photo of Babe Ruth knocked out at a game in July of 1924, the comments provide the entire story of what happened. It’s truly amazing.

If you are considering making your personal photo archive available online, take a tour of the professional archives on Flickr. Not only do they provide outstanding examples of how to organize and present your photos, but they show how Flickr users have filled in many blanks in the stories depicted in the photos. For the personal archive, Flickr offers the tools needed to build an archive as professional as any of these public examples at a very affordable price. A well designed and organized collection will attract viewers and with luck their personal experiences and history will add even more value to your images.

Thanks to Tony Bandy at TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home, I have discovered Mabry’s Historical Text Archive. One man, Don Mabry, with a love of history has collected articles, books and links from across the web to build a fabulous archive of historical information. His site contains 751 articles, 71 electronic books and 7,921 links. I’m especially fascinated because many of the front page items are about northeast Florida!

It’s a great find and a great example of how a personal archive can make a difference.

This article was originally published at the Graveyard Rabbit Online Journal. It describes yet another benefit of electronic publishing.

The Living Book of the Dead

The Scribd document management and publishing platform offers the family historian a broad range of features and services to support the construction and management of your personal archive. Every document is indexed by the major search engines and can be embedded on web sites, posted to Facebook and even sent to a growing number of portable eReader devices. And it costs you nothing.

Your user profile becomes the home page of your archive. In this example, you see that the Minnesota Historical Society only uses the profile to point visitors to their primary web site, but you can easily include information about the families, locations and time periods your research covers as well as a link to your site/blog. Like many other social platforms, Scribd provides both commenting capabilities and a discrete messaging system to help connect with other researchers.

When you compare this personal profile with the society profile, you’ll notice several differences. Here, historysaver3684 has spent the time and effort to provide titles, descriptions and tags to each of his publications and has twice the number of reads as a result. You can also see how Scribd’s social aspects are being used to connect with other Scribd users.

Every document has its own page. Front and center is the document reader with a menu of options available to the visitor. The publisher determines some of the menu options – like whether or not visitors can download a copy of the document – and the two buttons outlined in red are only visible to the document’s publisher. In this case, anyone can download a copy, embed it on their site or share it via Twitter, Facebook or a number of other networks. The Mobile button will format the document for the portable device visitor’s selected device and then send it to that device.

You can upload documents in any number of formats including MS Office (Word, PowerPoint and Excel) and OpenOffice.org. For best results, Scribd recommends uploading your publications in Portable Document Format (PDF). Your formatting, graphics and font styles are best preserved when using PDF. Although a formatted photo book would be a good candidate for publishing at Scribd, individual photos would be better published on a photo-sharing platform such as Flickr (more on that in an upcoming article).

To learn more about Scribd and how to use it to build your personal archive, here is my Getting Started with Scribd guide which you are welcome to read here or download for later.