Tech T.I.P. - 8/4/2011

Life After Life

By Denise Olson

Imagine a columbarium that creates life. You'll find one in the waters off Key Biscayne, Florida. The Neptune Memorial Reef is building a beautiful underwater memorial that is also an artificial reef.  Concrete forms such as columns, wall sections and shells are cast using the ashes of the deceased and then placed on the reef with brass plaques providing the inscriptions.  The structures have been designed to promote coral growth. It is already attracting a lot of fascinating marine life. The reef is easily accessible to divers and is a frequent destination. 

While the reef gives you the impression of the ruins of a lost civilization, in reality you are looking at some very impressive technology. The structures aren't just a columbarium or a diving destination, they are helping to keep the waters around south Florida alive and well.

As you can see in the video below, the results are beautiful.  So now, after you pass you can create "life after life".

Denise B. Olson * Moultrie Creek
St. Augustine, Florida
Email: moultriecreek@yahoo.com * Skype: moultriecreek

Tech T.I.P. 5/5/2011

Can We Tweet?
by Denise Barrett Olson


A tweet is a short text message posted to one of the most versatile social networks, Twitter. At first glance Twitter appears to be one step up from a cell phone’s text messaging system, but on further inspection you will find that Twitter is more - much more. Today I want to show you how we Rabbits can put it to good use.

Twitter basics are pretty basic. Once you create a free account and set up your profile, you start looking for other interesting tweeps (Twitter people) to follow. When you follow someone, you’ll receive copies of their tweets (messages) in your timeline. When you post your own tweets, anyone following you will see them.

You don’t need permission to follow someone. If they look like someone interesting you click the Follow button. That’s it. If they turn out to be not so interesting after all, click Unfollow.

Tweets can’t be more than 140 characters long, however they can include links to web sites, blog posts, photos, videos and more. In the examples you see here, most of them include a link in the message. When you click on a tweet, a panel opens to the right giving you more information about that tweet.

There are several simple features that add a tremendous amount of functionality to these 140 characters. Let’s look at them and how they can be used.

You may have noticed the at sign (@) used in the tweets above. The at sign is used to identify a username. For example, my Twitter username is moultriecreek and when someone wants to write about something I did or said, they will add the at sign in front of my username (example: @moultriecreek). Twitter will automatically make that reference into a link to my Twitter profile page. You can click on one of these references to learn more about the person or company being discussed. In the expanded pane above, that’s already done for you.

Yes, companies can have Twitter accounts. My sample timeline shows several businesses and organizations. It’s a quick, easy and cheap way to keep people informed about your company or organization. Local tv and radio stations use Twitter to post weather and traffic alerts. Restaurants and markets announce daily specials. The guy who runs the very low-tech fresh market in my neighborhood keeps us updated on new arrivals - from his cell phone.

Since tweets are only text, they can be sent from any cell phone with text messaging capabilities. This can be very handy - especially in emergency situations. When a disaster happens, the phone systems are quickly overwhelmed, but you can often get a text message through. And, one message sent to Twitter tells everyone who’s following you that you are okay. No, you would not want to post all your comings and goings to Twitter, but it sure can help in times of disaster.

Another useful Twitter tool is the hashtag. A hashtag is a word or acronym preceded by a hash mark (#) and is used to collect tweets related to a specific topic. You’ll find #genealogy used frequently and #GYRabbits identifies a Rabbit-related tweet. To collect all the conversation around a hashtag, use Twitter’s search function to find them. Just type your hashtag into the search bar at the top of the browser’s window to display the results. If this is a conversation you want follow, click the Save this search button to add it to your personal search list. They’re always available from the Search drop-down menu at the top of your timeline.

One last Twitter feature - the list. This allows you to organize the people you’re following into groups. You might have a list for family and friends, another for the genealogy people you follow and one for local news. After creating your lists, choose the one you want to view from the List drop-down menu and you’ll only see tweets from the people on that list.

Now that I’ve described some of the things that make Twitter so handy, it’s time to ask for your help. Twitter has even more advantages for a group - such as the GYRabbits. There are a growing number of web-based platforms and apps that take advantage of Twitter’s deceptively simple platform to create some truly fascinating things. And, since I think the GYRabbits are pretty darn fascinating, I’d like to see us get some of the attention we deserve.

Here you see a delightful online newspaper made up of blog posts that have been announced on Twitter by various genealogy societies and genealogists. I have created a Twitter list of these groups and used it to create this newspaper. The newspaper app looks at the tweets posted by the people in my list and follows their links back to the blog posts or news articles they’ve tweeted about. The information from those posts is pulled into the paper to build today’s edition. Click on any article title to view the entire article at its originating site. Tomorrow, this little paper will do the same thing all over again. Don’t worry though, the paper also maintains its own archives so if you miss a day you can catch up tomorrow.

Although Twitter looks quite simple to us, there are some truly amazing things happening behind the scenes. At the top of that list is the programming interface that allows applications like paper.li to build beautiful ways to share custom collections of tweets. This app can create a daily or weekly paper based on a Twitter account, a list or even a hashtag.

I would very much love to see all the GYRabbits together in one beautiful package like this. We can make it happen with paper.li, but first we need three things - from you. First, we need all our Rabbits using Twitter and second, we need you all “announcing” each GYRabbit article with a tweet. Both are very simple processes. It will only take a minute to sign up for a free Twitter account. Second, you will need to set up your blog to announce each post. There is another free online app called Twitter Feed that will do this for you - no matter which blogging platform you’re using. Set up a Twitter Feed account, enter your feed info for your blog, then connect it to your Twitter account. That’s it! Now, every time you post an article on your GYRabbit site, it will be announced on Twitter with a link back to your post. Last, please send a tweet to @moultriecreek with the #GYRabbits hashtag so I can add you to our Twitter list.

Once the GYRabbits newspaper goes live, we’ll announce it on Twitter because, in addition to having a gorgeous showcase for our Rabbits, we also have a way to easily connect with each other. I look forward to receiving your tweets!

Tech T.I.P. 11/25/2010

Discover Digital Libraries

Denise Barrett Olson

The last couple of years has brought a growing buzz of news about e-books and readers like the Kindle, Nook and iPad. Actually, electronic books (e-books) have been around for quite some time. Groups like the Project Gutenberg folks have been digitizing public domain books for years. And, a growing number of archives are discovering the benefits of digitizing their collections. Not only does this provide a way to make these delicate items available for public access, but it's also a cost-effective disaster management plan.

The e-reading craze has been a boon to researchers as many more public domain books are being digitized to add to the pool of books available on these devices. I'm especially delighted to see more and more local and military histories appear along with memoirs, journals and diaries. While Benjamin Taylor's Pictures of Life in Camp and Field will never be a best seller, to someone researching the Civil War battles at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, it could be a treasure-trove of information.

Cemetery researchers also benefit as a growing number of books about cemeteries are also showing up in these libraries. For example, at the Internet Archive you'll find books from the American Battle Monuments Commission for each of the American cemeteries in Europe. These books contain photos, maps, history of the cemetery and the battles that populated it.

Why are these digital resources important? They give us a snapshot of the area or cemetery at the time the book was published. In my case, a cemetery inventory from 1892-93 includes descriptions of wooden grave markers that no longer exist. I found a copy of that inventory spread across several issues of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register.

Where can you find these books? A good place to start is the Internet Archive. Their collection covers texts, images, video and audio - and don't forget the Web's Wayback Machine. In the Texts section, searches for "cemetery", "graveyard", "tombstone" and "epitaph" turn up dozens of titles. Books can be viewed in your web browser or downloaded in any number of formats. By the way . . . the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center is one of Internet Archive's digitizing sponsors and you can keep up with their contributions by visiting their page at the site.

Most of us are already familiar with Google Books as a research resource. Here you'll find both public domain and copyrighted publications. Google also offers both in-the-browser viewing and download options. Project Gutenberg is the grandfather of public domain libraries and another great resource. They have recently updated their interface making it even more user-friendly. The online reader is still only plain text but they are offering a growing number of download options.

If you are lucky enough to have an e-reader (or are expecting one from Santa), you might find FeedBooks and ManyBooks.net handy. There is no web-based viewer - only downloads - but my experience has been that these books have less formatting and OCR errors than other sources. Both offer RSS feeds to keep up with new titles added to the library.

Take some time and browse "the stacks" of these digital libraries to see what gems you can find. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Good hunting!

Tech T.I.P. 9/30/2010

Create a Cemetery Virtual Tour

Denise Barrett Olson

You have researched the cemeteries in your local area. You know their history and you've taken the time to learn about some of the more interesting people, gravestones and epitaphs. You've taken dozens of photos and told many of the stories on your blog. Have you ever considered pulling it all together into a virtual tour?

Mission of Nombre de Dios from Moultrie Creek on Vimeo.

No, you don't have to have any movie experience or fancy equipment. You can easily pull it all together with a basic photo editor and a presentation graphic app like Microsoft's PowerPoint, iWork's Keynote or OpenOffice.org's Impress. Combine your photos with a narrated story and you can build a fascinating look at your favorite cemetery.

Here's how.

I built my tour using iWork's Keynote for the Mac. Although the actual commands are different, the process will be much the same with each app. These presentation apps are really quite versatile and will support just about every aspect of the production process. The only thing they can't do is edit your photos.

Keynote’s Light Table View

The first - and most important - step is to create the story board. I start by adding slides for each topic I want to include in my tour. I'll include slides with the photos I want to use. At this point, I'm not too concerned about order - I'm mostly brain-storming. I use the "presenter notes" area to make notes about what I want to show or say at this point in the presentation.

Next, I'll begin to fine-tune my story. Take advantage of Keynote's Light Table view (called Slide Sorter in PowerPoint) and drag and drop slides to reorder them. Once again the presenter's notes area comes in handy and my notes get fleshed out into a script. Not only do I have all the "production information" contained in one file, but now I can print a copy of the slides with the notes/script to use while I'm recording the narration. Don't forget to include a slide at the end of the presentation to give yourself credit - and include the address of your blog.

Slide view showing script text in the presenters notes area under the slide image

I use my headset to record the narrative. While a quiet recording location is preferred, it’s not always possible. The headset helps to filter out distracting noises like the tv in the next room or the dog's squeaky toy. Your app probably offers the option to record the entire presentation or add audio clips slide by slide. I usually prefer to record the entire presentation. Yes, I often flub a word or lose my place and have to record my presentation several times before I have results I'll produce.

You now have a slideshow with sound. It's time to put it online for everyone to see. The easiest option is to upload your PowerPoint file to SlideBoom . This slide sharing platform supports slideshows with narration, embedding the show on your blog site and offers free accounts. It can also handle OpenOffice.org Impress files that have been saved in PowerPoint format.

Keynote users and PowerPoint 2010 users can export their presentations as movies and then upload them to their favorite movie-sharing platform like YouTube or Vimeo . Like SlideBoom, these movies can also be embedded on a post at your blog.

My best advice is to start small and experiment. Build a three-slide presentation, record a short narration and upload it to the site of your choice. Look at the image quality, listen to the sound and make adjustments to your images, text and narration until it's just the way you want it. Make sure to look at the uploaded version so you aren't surprised - like I was - to find something like the volume on the uploaded presentation being significantly lower than my desktop version.

Your experiments will build your confidence and you'll soon find yourself a full-fledged documentarian!

If you're looking for inspiration, take a look at Maureen Taylor's video podcasts . These are delightful short stories and great examples of the possibilities available with tools we already have.

Tech T.I.P 6/10/2010

Managing Your Blog Archives

by Denise Barrett Olson

Although the blog platform is one of the easiest ways to publish online, it does have a few drawbacks. One of the biggest is the blog archive. Once your blog post rolls off the home page, who will ever find it again? Granted, some platforms do better than others, but for those of us documenting graveyards, families and local history, all could use some improvement. Until that happens, here are some things you can do to improve access to your archived posts.

Every blog platform offers the ability to organize archived posts by date. Although there may be readers and publishers who can remember archived articles by the month/year they were published, my guess is they are few and far between. Another possibility is the search engine - both the search box on your blog and the big guys like Google and Yahoo. While these do offer access to archived posts, they have limited capabilities.

One good way to organize your posts is through the use of tags. Just about every blog platform - from micro to full-service - offers the ability to include tags with each post. [Blogger calls them Labels.] Tags usually appear as links in the metadata associated with each blog (author, date published, tags, etc.). Each tag link will display all the other posts tagged with that keyword. Most blog platforms also include widgets to display your tags in the blog’s sidebar. Sometimes they are displayed as a “cloud” of keywords and sometimes as a list. Once again, clicking on a particular tag will display all its posts.

You can include multiple tags, making this capability even more flexible. For example, if I’m writing a post about Robert Murphy’s gravestone at St. Augustine National Cemetery, I’d include at least three tags: gravestone, surname:Murphy, St. Augustine National Cemetery. By developing a scheme of standard tag keywords, you can provide a simple way to retrieve posts by topic. At my GYR site, I always include tags identifying the cemetery and topic of the article. When writing about individual gravestones, I include the person’s surname. So, a reader who wants to learn more about St. Augustine National Cemetery can just click on the cemetery tag at the bottom of this article about Mr. Murphy to display all the other articles tagged with that tag.

You’ll notice that I use the format “surname:Murphy”. I do that because I have several surnames - like my Link family - which are tough to search. By including the surname: prefix, searches will still find the tag even if they are only searching for “Murphy”, but people searching for “surname:Murphy” won’t have to weed through a bunch of useless stuff too. Yes, I know that until this idea catches on throughout the genealogy community, it isn’t helping much, but you’ve gotta start somewhere . . .

Speaking of searching, these tags not only help organize your blog site, but they also make your posts easier to find using the big search engines. Tags are not just a blog feature, they are used in many other platforms like Flickr (photo-sharing), YouTube (video-sharing) and social networks. Search engines put tags to work to help them discover and organize all this online content.

WordPress and TypePad also include a category feature where you can set up your own system of categories to organize your content. I’m not sure about TypePad, but WordPress allows you to nest categories - similar to an outline. This gives you even more flexibility.

If you have control of your template (which usually costs extra for hosted blogs), you can create custom page designs for your top level categories. In the example shown here, the Family Matters section page within the Moultrie Creek Gazette blog has its own logo with the associated posts listed underneath. If you looked at the URL for this page, you will see it includes “cat=1” at the end meaning it is displaying a list of items assigned category number 1 (the Family Matters category). Even if you don’t have control of your template, you can set up a blogroll of links to the sections within your blog - similar to the Inside the Gazette example you see here at the top of the sidebar.

Most blog platforms have widgets that display your categories in the sidebar. Some offer both nested list and category cloud options. By copying the URLs for specific categories, you can easily create custom tables of content to specific types of content. These same ideas work for tags.

Your blog is full of valuable content. With a little effort on your part, you can make sure those earlier posts continue to get the attention they deserve. Take advantage of your blog platform’s capabilities to provide our readers with easy access to those archives.

It wouldn’t hurt to spotlight an archived article now and again either.

Tech T.I.P. 4/29/2010

How to build a Cemetery Photo Archive
by Denise Barrett Olson

Graveyard Rabbits have been documenting their graveyards with stories and photos. If you are like me, you’ve got a growing collection of cemetery photos. Besides using them in your blog articles, what are you doing with them? Have you considered an online archive to share your photos with others?

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 knowledge base 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.

When building a cemetery 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.

One other Flickr feature - Groups - already has a huge following with cemetery photos. As I discussed in a recent Journal article, you will find dozens of cemetery photo groups with tens of thousands of photos from cemeteries all over the world.

If you are considering making your cemetery 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. 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.