04.17.08
Posted in Daily Journal, Blogs at 12:30 pm by Administrator
Today is the second anniversary of Steve’s Genealogy blog!
Two years ago, I wrote my first tentative post and then proceeded to fly to Salt Lake City for the United Polish Genealogical Societies (UPGS) Conference. Several of my first posts were written in the Family History Library itself.
As it turns out, the UPGS 2008 Conference starts on Friday evening, so I’ll be blogging directly from the Family History Library again this weekend.
As of today, I’ve written 730 articles, which works out to almost exactly one post per day for two years. Not bad.
From the start, one of the primary goals of this blog was to publish my family history and link the events in the family history to images of the original documents. I want people to see how I came to the conclusions I did. I want people to point out errors. I want people to provide suggestions. I want the world to see that the genealogies I’ve compiled are worthy of their confidence and trust.
And, I want to share my work with others.
Anyone who reads this blog can take the facts I’ve compiled and use them in their own family history research without any need to ask permission. However, the narratives I’ve written and the photographs I’ve taken are copyrighted. If anyone wishes to reproduce any content to which I own the copyright, I simply request that you ask my permission and credit me as the author.
In the course of posting these records, I’ve connected with cousins in Poland, England, and the United States who found information about our common ancestors on my blog. I’ve also connected with a few people who may be related, but we still need to find some original sources with primary information in order to confirm our relationship.
I’ve received queries from a number of people asking me for genealogical guidance and advice. I try to help people out when I can. Likewise, I’ve received messages from a number of people providing me with advice, information, and corrections to what I have posted. Thanks to everyone who has helped me in my genealogical research. I really would not be as far along in my research without their help!
Three other genealogy bloggers also started a blog in April 2006: Randy Seaver, Megan Smolenyak, and Joe Beine. Here’s to two years of blogging and a virtual toast for many more!
Copyright © 2008 by Stephen J. Danko
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08.29.07
Posted in Daily Journal, Blogs at 12:01 am by Administrator
I first found out about Ancestry’s Internet Biographical Collection on Monday from Dick Eastman’s blog. I didn’t pay much attention, but I noticed that several people were rather angry about the collection.
Then, on Tuesday, Janice of Cow Hampshire left on comment on my blog alerting me to the fact that Ancestry had cached my blog in the Internet Biographical Collection and was requiring a paid subscription to view the cached pages. Thanks, Janice. You got my attention.
Viewing the Cached Pages
By the time I looked at the collection, Ancestry had already made changes, making the Collection a free database and including a link to the original website on the record page. I did not see the original presentation of the database that originally created so much furor.
The current format of Ancestry’s cached database is not much different than the search results obtained from Google, Yahoo!, or the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. My blog is cached in all those places. One notable difference, though, is that the cached pages on Google and Yahoo both include a disclaimer at the top of the cached page indicating that the content does not belong to them. Ancestry and the Wayback Machine currently do not include such disclaimers.
How Can I Enforce My Copyright?
My blog is protected by copyright. A while back, an attorney who specializes in copyrights, patents, and trademarks recommended that I add a copyright statement on my blog. While a copyright notice is not required in order to protect my creative work, the notice is intended to remind others that the work is, indeed, copyrighted.
However, to file suit to enforce the copyright, I must register my creative works with the United States Copyright Office. Online works must be submitted in full, regardless of length, either on CD or in printed form and a $45 fee must accompany the registration. If the work is not registered, I cannot sue to enforce the copyright.
If I register the work, I can sue for actual damages. Given that I don’t make any money on this blog, I’d have a hard time proving actual damages. But, if I had registered the creative work before the act of infringement, I could sue for statutory damages up to $150,000 without the need to demonstrate actual damages.
Unfortunately, a district court in Nevada determined that Google’s cache complied with Fair Use in the United States. If authors don’t want their website or blog cached, the author must take the initiative to prevent their online works from being cached. Other genealogy blogs have mentioned ways to do this. Note that this same precedent may not apply in other countries, however.
With all this information, it seems that it’s up to me to ensure that my blog is not cached. A lawsuit would probably not be productive.
Be aware that I am not a lawyer and I am not qualified to give others legal advice. The discussion above is based on my own limited understanding of copyright law.
To Cache or Not To Cache?
One problem with online information is that content that’s here today may be gone tomorrow. If my blog is removed from the Internet, the cache may be the only way to recover the information previously there. Broken links abound on the Internet. So do cached representations of what was once located on missing web pages.
If I decide to stop paying for web hosting, my blog will disappear. If someone who uses free hosting through Blogspot, WordPress, LiveJournal, etc. doesn’t post anything for a while, the host may delete the blog. The content would be lost unless cached.
If, however, I want to erase all traces of my blog from the Internet, cached remnants may remain. I guess this means that we should be careful when posting information on the Internet. Once posted, it may be cached forever. Or maybe not. It all depends on how long the cache is preserved.
So What Will I Do?
Since Ancestry is now allowing free access to the cached pages of my blog and is now providing a more easily located link back to my blog, I don’t have any significant issues with my blog being cached by Ancestry. At this point, the cache appears to be little different than the caches maintained by Google, Yahoo! and the Wayback Machine. If I don’t like the idea of my blog being cached, I can take steps to prevent cached posts from all sources, not just Ancestry.
The debut of Ancestry’s Internet Biographical Collection has generated a lot of justifiable anger. I’m grateful to those whose posts and comments encouraged Ancestry to change their policies on this database. I’m also encouraged by the fact that Ancestry actually listened.
With luck, someone may actually find my blog through the cache on Ancestry, and I’m all for that. And, if Ancestry continues to maintain the cache of my blog after the blog itself ceases to exist, well I’m all for that, too.
Copyright © 2007 by Stephen J. Danko
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07.25.07
Posted in Daily Journal, Blogs at 12:01 am by Administrator
The last two presentations on Sunday at WordCamp 2007 were low-key presentations by the developers at WordPress.
State of the Word
Matt Mullenweg, lead developer and cofounder of WordPress (and the man behind WordCamp), spoke about the State of the Word.
Matt first answered questions that everyone wants to ask about WordPress.
- There are 16 people at Automattic, the company behind WordPress
- There are 100 full-time people working on WordPress worldwide
- Automattic makes money on WordPress paid sites and commercial use of WordPress and the Akismet spam-catcher
In the last year, the WordPress community developed bbPress, MU 1.0, autosave, tabbed editing, import & export, Ajax, extensions to XML-PRC, custom headers, and widgets.
There have been 10 releases of WordPress in the last year and 2,849,349 downloads of the WordPress platform. On WordPress.com, there have been 1,041,846 new blogs, 20,212,994 new posts, 1,648,046,157 page views, and billions of spam targeting blogs.
Matt said that Automattic has done very well at what they’re good at and haven’t done well at what they’re not good at. Matt described his vision of WordPress as a small, light platform. WordPress doesn’t have to do everything.
Matt also envisions modifications to make it easier for users to customize their designs and allow users to extract content in WordPress to other applications. Other planned improvements include plug-in update notification, tags, an improved “draft” and “pending” systems, and internationalization by translation into other languages.
Automattic has planned to announce a major release every four months, meaning that version 2.3 should be released in September and 2.4 in January.
Image handling is one of the weakest parts of WordPress and is a priority for development. Audio and video handling are also important areas for improvement. These functions are currently in plug-ins but may be moved to the core.
Developer Duke-out
Matt Mullenweg emceed the Developer Duke-out, asking questions of a panel of four WordPress developers: Mark Jaquith, Donncha O’Caoimh, Michael Adams, and Andy Skelton. Questions were also invited from the audience.
Q: What plug-ins do you use?
A: Ajax, comments subscription, Hello Dolly, Akismet, stats
Q: What’s your favorite beer?
A: Becks, Leffe, Chocolate Stout, Magic Hat #9
Q: What is most important to get done
A: Automatic update for plug-ins and core, better media, photos
Q: Should WordPress and WordPress MU be combined?
A: They almost are, it would add more bulk, MU has a lot that most people don’t need
Q: What theme do you use?
A: Sandbox
Q: How timely should security issues be fixed?
A: Three releases a year, sometimes they are released instantly, several fixes may be related and bundled, it depends on the severity
Q: What would you use if WordPress were not available?
A: TextPattern, nothing (drink the Kool-Aid)
Q: How do you deal with a theme that doesn’t work with a plug-in?
A: Go to IRC or WordPress forums to explain the problem
Q: Should WordPress be marketed as a Content Management System?
A: No, no, maybe, maybe
Q: What is your favorite thing to work on in WordPress?
A: low-lying fruit, PayPal instant notification, bbPress, BackPress, writing new code to fix problems that people don’t really know about yet
Q: How do you backup?
A: Gmail account, scripter, depends on host, do MySQL dump every night
Q: What do you do when you’re not programming?
A: Computer games, motorcycling, read, photograph, take car of baby, photograph, walk
Q: What would you change about photo resizing and Flickr tie-in?
A: Behind the scenes resizing - there’s a plug-in, easier way to find images
Q: Parsing XML: XMLParse or regular expressions?
A: Depends, reg ex, no idea, reg ex
Q: Boxers or briefs?
A: boxer briefs, boxers, boxer briefs, boxers
Q: Should we continue IIS?
A: Not that difficult, but MU doesn’t support it
Q: When was the last time you posted to a support forum?
A: A month ago, last week, June
Q: What’s the ghettoist thing you’ve done with WordPress?
A: Blogs of the day, theme, theme, deleted blogs that weren’t backed up, blog order form for Taco Tuesday
Q: How do you get a developer to work on a great idea you have for a new plug-in?
A: Ask, sometimes if it’s cool or easy, they’ll want to work on it, beer
Q: Mac or Windows?
A: Mac with parallels but also like a PC, Mac or Linux + nano text editor, Linux Mac vim, Mac textmate
Q: If we were to write WordPress in a different language?
A: Python, BF, XSLT
Q: Should the default BlogRoll stay or go?
A: It should go, one the face it could just include WordPress resources, don’t care
Q: How about a credits page in the Admin?
A: yes, yes, yes, yes
And so ended WordCamp 2007. For more information (almost to the point of information overload) with photos, information on the speakers and attendees (I was attendee 308, I think, and as of today information on only the first 300 were posted), and synopses of the sessions, visit The WordCamp Report by Patrick Havens.
Copyright © 2007 Stephen J. Danko
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07.24.07
Posted in Daily Journal, Blogs at 12:01 am by Administrator
On Sunday afternoon, after a barbeque lunch and musical entertainment from Andy Skelton, the WordCamp 2007 sessions continued.
The Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing
The first session of the afternoon was Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing by Dave Winer.
Blogging, Podcasting, and Unconferencing are all similar forms of communication on the web. Developers of the platforms for these applications should design the platform from the standpoint of the user. When the developers lose track of the user, the product gets off track.
Dave Winer is often credited with publishing the first blog. He said, however, that the first blog was actually the first website at CERN.
In Dave’s position as contributing editor at Wired in February 1996, Dave was involved in a project to fight censorship on the web. In an effort called 24 Hours of Democracy, users were encouraged to publish as many articles on democracy as they could. The mail list used for this effort flamed out.
On a mail list everyone has the final say on an issue. On a mail list, people argue that others can’t say something. On a blog, this doesn’t happen because noone posting a comment can tell the author of the blog what he or she cannot say. Mail lists may start out productive, but many suddenly become non-productive.
Consideration should be made to making blog archives future-safe. Why shouldn’t today’s blogs still be available in a hundred years? Technology and platforms change and present a challenge to making what is written in blogs today available in the future. Archive.org may be a possible solution, but Archive.org has not been around very long. A solution to this problem may be to partner Archive.org with an organization like Harvard and allow people to archive their work there in exchange for an endowment.
Data portability is an issue. Can the entire contents of a blog be transferred to another platform as platforms change with time? In WordPress 2.1 portability was included by not tested between platforms.
Social networking platforms such as Twitter, FaceBook, Pownce, and MySpace generated some discussion. While Dave didn’t understand the appeal of FaceBook, it appeared that the way most people found out about the WordCamp party on Saturday night was through FaceBook.
Usability Analysis of WordPress
Liz Danzico from Happy Cog discussed the Usability Analysis of WordPress commissioned by WordPress.
It’s important to get noticed (by Google, for example), but people don’t notice good design. Bad design forces people to change the design.
Liz quoted Mark Jaquith from 21 Feb 200&:
“That’s when I know WordPress is doing its job: when people aren’t aware they’re using it because they’re too busy using it.”
Happy Cog created user personas and watched people use the WordPress Admin. As a consequence, a revision of the Admin is coming in WordPress 2.4. The revision will be based on the paths that people actually use. Users tend not to care what the designers intended. The decisions on the changes to the admin will be based not on what the users say, but on what they actually do, as observed by Happy Cog.
On the WordPress Dashboard, the latest activity is all people really care about, so the dashboard will be redesigned to reflect that observation.
People don’t like surprises. Showing people something they’ve never seen before or showing something in a new way is great for blog content, but it’s not good for the Admin section of a blog platform. An attempt is being made to standardize the headers on each page of the Admin to ensure consistency among the pages.
The Admins of many blogging platforms are positioned as objects (nouns), but on WordPress the Admin is positioned as actions (verbs). Analysis of experiments with users to see if nouns or verbs were preferred by WordPress users showed that verbs are the answer.
Drafts of posts are not drafts most of the time. In the new Admin, posts will be identified as Published, Scheduled, or Unpublished.
Other possible changes discussed were:
- a visual display of what a widget will look like on the blog,
- separation of primary navigation from utilities,
- the ability to reply to comments from within the comment panel rather than from the post,
- Admin themes or skins,
- better photo management, including a more visual uploading process and the ability to specify different sizes,
- a redesign of video and audio,
- tags
- relocation of Plug-Ins
Liz summarized her discussion:
- Be voyeurs,
- Don’t surprise people,
- Anticipate what people need,
- Don’t be brief at the cost of clarity
- Show, don’t tell
- Never stop at a dead end.
Tomorrow: The Finale of WordCamp 2007.
Copyright © 2007 Stephen J. Danko
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07.23.07
Posted in Daily Journal, Blogs at 12:01 am by Administrator
Last year, for the first time, the folks at WordPress decided to host the first WordCamp, a one day, all day seminar on WordPress. I attended last year and learned a lot, especially because I had only been blogging on WordPress for three months at the time.
I signed up for WordCamp again this year, but this years’ event was a two day event, and despite my best efforts I was only able to attend on Sunday.
Since I’m not a Tech Geek, some of the presentations were a bit over my head. Nonetheless, I had a great time and learned a lot. What follows is a summary of what I learned from the first three presentations at WordCamp 2007 on Sunday.
HyperDB and High Performance WordPress
The morning began with a presentation by Barry Abrahamson and Matt Mullenweg on HyperDB and High Performance WordPress.
The presentation described ways to serve as many users as possible with a reasonable amount of resources. Without going into details, the basic configuration of WordPress can serve 8 requests per second and 691,200 page views per day. This default configuration is good enough for most WordPress installations.
Using different caches, the performance can be improved as much as 25-fold.
WordPress.com hosts over 1.2 million blogs and serves over 10 million pageviews per day.
Blogs on the New York Times
Jeremy Zilar discussed his responsibilities managing blogs at the New York Times. The New York Times hosts over 100 blogs, although there are currently 30-40 active blogs, and primarily uses one blog template. All blogs run off of a single install of WordPress, and together enjoy 13 million pageviews per month.
Jeremy showed the City Room blog at the New York Times and mentioned that in print media, writers essentially have a one-way communication with the reader. Blogs allow the writer to engage the readers and most readers have something to say. Blogs generate controversy and drama and many readers will comment in extreme situations and when they feel safe.
Designing Massively Multiplayer Social Systems
Rashmi Sinha presented a talk on Designing Massively Multiplayer Social Systems and discussed a project she is working on called SlideShare. She mentioned that second generation social networks allow individuals to link to each other based on common interests.
Services such as LinkedIn allow people to connect with each other by sending invitations to link together, providing a somewhat artificial environment. Object-based social networks provide a different way to connect.
With these object-based networks, people share objects and view the objects others share. Content that someone finds interesting (such as a video on YouTube) is passed on to others. Rashmi referred to this as viral sharing, since the sharing of these objects spreads throughout the network.
Other social networks include tag-based social sharing such as del.icio.us and social news creation by rating news stories such as digg.
SlideShare offers users to share presentations. People share lesson plans, cartoons, paintings, humor, activism, mother’s day cards, and talk slides, among others.
Rashmi mentioned that the positions of early bloggers who became popular are hard to dislodge. When someone’s blog is popular, its popularity helps it become even more popular. The rich get richer.
When starting out, a blog’s popularity is more important than quality. People who are well-known tend to get mobs following them when they start a blog.
One observation Rashmi shared was that on social networks such as SlideShare where the actions of users can be tracked, the host can determine which objects are most popular by tag, comment, views, embed, download, and email. Of course, when a given object is listed at the top of one of these categories, such as the most viewed, others tend to also view that content. Thus, the most viewed are viewed even more.
Tomorrow: More from WordCamp 2007.
Copyright © 2007 Stephen J. Danko
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03.08.07
Posted in Daily Journal, Blogs at 1:31 pm by Administrator
I found a new genealogy blog of note today - The Amateurologist.
Welcome back, Lee! 
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10.01.06
Posted in Daily Journal, Blogs at 4:21 am by Administrator
The Genealogue is one of the genealogy blogs read regularly, and I’ve set up an RSS feed to be alerted to new posts. The author, Chris Dunham, warns that the site contains ”Genealogy News You Can’t Possibly Use”. Here are the top ten reasons The Genealogue is better than your morning cup of coffee:
10. Chris Dunham is descended from not one, but two Salem witches.
9. When Chris leaves for vacation, he not only notifies his readers that he will be away from the computer, but he provides directions and a detailed map if one needs to find him in an emergency.
8. Chris doesn’t pretend to know everything, except of course that which he, himself invents.
7. The Genealogue has participated in Censuswhacking.
6. Like Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak’s contest to find out what happened to Annie Moore, The Genealogue has launched a immigration research contest and has offered a fabulous reward for the lucky person who discovers Where’s Arne?
5. Chris Dunham’s profile shows that his occupation is “Unprofessional Genealogist”. Of course, that still doesn’t compare with the occupation of Alfred Goold, whose occupation is listed in the 1901 British Census as “living on condensed milk”.
4. Chris is the proud author of The Genealogist’s Glossary, described as “Recommended for every family historian who has ever laughed at the archives or giggled in a cemetery”.
3. The Genealogue’s Top Ten Lists provide valuable guidance that genealogists knew they never needed. Cases in point are the Top Ten Genealogist Pick Up Lines and the Top Ten Ways to Make Genealogy More Exciting.
2. The Genealogue Exclusive in which Chris interviewed Annie Moore is the best piece of genealogical journalism on the net. Chris even managed to scoop The National Enquirer and The Weekly World News on this one!
1. Caffeine has been shown to increase blood pressure. The Genealogue has been shown in unsupervised, uncontrolled, non-clinical studies to lower blood pressure. We all want to make sure you live long enough to finish your genealogy.
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06.29.06
Posted in Daily Journal, Blogs at 9:23 pm by Administrator
One of the genealogy-themed blogs that I read on a regular basis is Creative Gene written by Jasia. After reading her blog for a while, I realized that we are a lot alike and am now convinced that we must have been separated at birth. Here are the top ten reasons why:
10. We are both of Polish descent and we are almost the same age. I won’t be so unkind as to tell you how old we are ,though.
9. We both enjoy writing. Jasia completed a historical novel about her family history through Na No Wri Mo last November. I’m planning to write a historical novel about my family, and have been thinking about trying Na No Wri Mo this November, but I’m hoping somebody will stop me before I do something I may regret!
8. We both spend a day taking pictures and find that we’ve taken way too many photos of gravestones.
7. Jasia’s first SLR camera was a Canon ME Super. Mine was a Canon ME. I was on a budget. Jasia received a Canon Digital Rebel XT for Christmas. I want a Canon Digital Rebel XT for Christmas.
6. Jasia enjoys reading mystery novels by Janet Evanovich, who has just released her 12th novel in the Stephanie Plum series. I enjoy reading mystery novels by Sister Carol Anne O’Marie, who has just released her 11th novel in the Sister Mary Helen series. Both Janet Evanovich and Sister Carol Anne O’Marie are published by St. Martin’s Press.
5. Jasia has 17 first cousins on her father’s side of the family and she is one of the youngest. I have 18 living first cousins on my father’s side and I am one of the youngest.
4. Jasia’s paternal grandfather died 5 years before she was born. My paternal grandfather died 2 years before I was born.
3. Jasia lives about 60 miles from Hell (Michigan). I have friends who live about 90 miles from Purgatory (Maine). I live about 190 miles from Heavenly (California).
2. We both have blonde hair (OK, my hair has been getting darker the older I get). Jasia has blue eyes (at least I think she has blue eyes from her picture). I would have blue eyes if it weren’t for that pesky dominant gene for brown eyes I inherited from my maternal grandmother.
1. Jasia and I have both never met each other.
Take a moment and visit Jasia’s blog. On July 3, she’s hosting a Carnival of Genealogy on her blog.
…And I stole the idea for a top ten list from the Genealogue, who I suspect may have stolen the idea from someone else.
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