Calvin's Genealogy

Category: Technology

  • Building Your Own Website

    Introduction

    Perhaps you’ve thought about building your own website. Here are some tips that may help you decide which route to go, depending on your needs. I don’t claim to be an expert on this topic and I admit that I’m biased, but perhaps some of this information will be helpful. I’m also assuming that you’re a normal human being and don’t want to dive into coding for a website, but rather choose a platform that allows you to focus on the content of the site rather than the behind-the-scenes technical aspects.

    What if I enjoy coding and the technical aspects? Does that mean I’m not a “normal” human being. Well, if the shoe fits… 🙂

    Type of Website

    What is your main purpose for creating a website? Here are some typical reasons:

    • You want to create a blog
    • You want to share digitized documents or photos with family and friends
    • You want to share information about your ancestors
    • You want a website for your company
    • You want to sell products

    There may be many reasons to create a website and most will allow you to do a combination or even all of the above. Your main purpose is important in choosing which route is best for you.

    Website Building Options at a High Level

    Let’s just dive in. I’ll list some options and give my very biased high level overview of each one. There will be many other products that I won’t list because I’m basing this on my own experience or from my own research.

    I’m also going to use a housing analogy where we compare websites from the range of renting a bedroom to owning your own home.

    • Blogger.com
      • Owned by Google
      • Free
      • Great way to get your own blog started
      • Super easy
      • Pretty much limited to a blog. Not many other website options.
      • Domain is typically something.blogspot.com, which is like renting a bedroom from someone. Don’t cook on a hot plate like Barney Fife did or the old lady that owns the home will yell at you.
      • Domain could also be a custom domain – something.com, which is still like renting a bedroom, but your friends think you have your own apartment.

      • Why is my blog going to be something.blogspot.com instead of something.blogger.com? This article explains it better than I can.
    • Google Sites
      • Free
      • I don’t have a lot of experience with this one. It’s probably easy to set up. It’s also probably fairly limited, but hey, it’s free.
      • Domain is typically sites.google.com/site/something, or sites.google.com/view/something, which again, is kind of like renting a bedroom.
      • Domain could also be a custom domain.
    • WordPress.com
      • Free, Paid upgrades
      • The leader in blog sites
      • Can do much more that blogging
      • Lots of plugins available for additional capabilities
      • Many themes to choose from to customize the look of your site
      • Domain is typically something.wordpress.com, which looks like you’re just renting a bedroom, but I would say you’re really renting a nice apartment.
      • Domain can be custom (for a monthly fee), so now you’ve upgraded to having your own apartment.
    • WordPress – with a shared hosting plan (sometimes referred to as WordPress.org)
      • Same as above except you install WordPress onto your own web hosting account. This is like owning your own home. Confused about what the difference is between a site on WordPress.com and one on a shared hosting plan? This article can help.
      • WordPress itself is free but you’ll need to pay a fee for your shared hosting plan.
      • What’s a shared hosting plan? Think of it as having your own web server. You can install programs (like WordPress), do your own scripting, create your own email accounts, upload your own files directly, just about anything that you can do with a real web server. The difference is that you don’t worry about any of the hardware. The company you partner with will be carving out resources from their vast resources of computers to give you some disk space for your site.
      • More involved to get started, but once things are set up, you can manage your site from the WordPress dashboard and you won’t have to get into coding.
      • Tons of plugins available that you can install. Many are free. Some charge a fee.
      • Tons of themes (free and paid) to customize the look of your site.
      • Who’s a good hosting provider? There a lot to choose from. My favorite right now is SiteGround, but Bluehost and Hostgator are also very popular. I’ve also used LunarPages for years and been happy with their service. Almost all of them charge a monthly fee (usually paid annually – tricky marketing) from around $3 – $10/month with higher fee tiers to give you more space, bandwidth, etc. The lowest fee option is usually fine for most websites.
      • WooCommerce (free WordPress plugin) can be used to add e-commerce capabilities for an online store.
      • WordPress is very popular, which means a lot of options for you.
      • Heard of “Managed WordPress Hosting”? Here’s an article to explain what that means.
      • Ultimate Guide: How to Make a Website in 2018 – Step by Step Guide (Free)
    • Weebly
      • Free, Paid upgrades
      • The free site will show a little Weebly banner in the footer of each page on your site.
      • The free site will be something.weebly.com. Looks like you’re renting a bedroom, but really, it’s a decent 2-bedroom apartment.
      • Paid version can have a custom domain, so now you really are in a decent 2-bedroom apartment.
      • Lots of plugins (installed apps) available, some free, some paid.
      • The great thing about Weebly is it’s drag-and-drop interface. You have lots of options to customize your pages with a very easy to use interface.
      • Some downsides with Weebly are the lack of accessing files directly like you would with a shared hosting provider. E-commerce is not as feature rich as the WordPress/WooCommerce approach.
    • Shopify
      • Paid, about $30/month and up
      • Great for getting an online store up and running
      • Lots of themes to choose from, free and paid
      • Limited ability to customize pages on your site. Shopify is really for an online store that maybe has other pages, not the other way around. In other words, if your primary goal is to sell stuff, go for it. However, if you want to have a website with the ability to customize how it looks and you also want to sell things, Shopify is not for you.
      • One thing I hate about Shopify is that almost every plugin that’s not free wants you to pay a monthly fee. I hate that. Let me pay $50 for it and be done with you, not $4/month. Grrr.
      • Oh yeah, the housing analogy. I guess this one is like renting a townhouse, which is just like a 2-bedroom apartment but it costs more and your friends are more impressed.
      • This article compares Shopify to WooCommerce for building an online store website.

    Like I warned you, this review is very biased and there are a ton of other options like Wix, Squarespace, and who knows what else? This article isn’t meant to review them all, but to just give a high level overview for the above options. I hope it might help someone out there.

    By the way, I use a shared hosting plan with WordPress and the Total theme by WPExplorer for this site. I use Weebly for calvinknight.com.

    Cheers!
    (I think that must be a cool way of signing off at the end of a blog even though I’m not from the UK, right?)

  • Updating Metadata for Digital Photos – Keeping It Simple

    Introduction

    If you’ve been to RootsTech or other genealogy conferences perhaps you’ve seen sessions on editing metadata for your digital photos, scanned documents, etc. If this is a new concept for you, prepare to be overwhelmed and frustrated. There is a ton of information on this topic and several methods for updating your metadata. It can be tough to understand it all and you might just give up on the idea. I will attempt to describe the very basics and demonstrate some simple methods that have worked for me. I’m certainly not an expert on this topic, but I hope this can help you.

    Note: The instructions in this article will work for .JPG files. It may not be the same for other file formats such as .TIF, .BMP, .GIF, etc. It doesn’t appear that you can work with the metadata for .PNG files. Also, if you’re using a Mac, well, you’re on your own. I have no idea if any of these techniques will help you. Sorry. And, why would you use a Mac? That’s silly.

    What the heck is metadata?

    Metadata is the data that describes other data. Or in this context, it’s the information about your digital image and your files already have some metadata embedded in them. Metadata can cover a wide range of information, such as the date that the image was created, the author, copyright, title, description, tags, camera/scanner make and model, etc. I mostly only bother with 3 pieces of information:

    • document title (sometimes referred to as object name). Some programs will show this when you hover your mouse over the image. This is where I put a simple description, like the name of the person in a photo.
    • caption (sometimes referred to as description). Some programs will show this in yellow text at the bottom of your image when previewing it. This is where you can put whatever you want. Put the place, the date, the names of the people in the photo, or even a URL.
    • create date, the date that the image was created. More on this later.

    Why bother?

    By adding metadata to your images, it becomes part of that image file. If the file is shared with others this information goes with the image. It’s the equivalent of writing on the back of a photo so you and others can know who’s in the photo, etc. This way you won’t need to keep this information elsewhere with some kind of cross-reference system.

    However, depending on how the image is shared, the metadata may not be retained. For example, if you upload a photo to Facebook and then someone right-clicks the photo to save it, they won’t have your metadata because they’re really grabbing a modified version of the photo that you uploaded. Facebook and many other sites will modify the image, making it smaller in size and resolution, etc.

    Also, some programs don’t keep your metadata in your new copy of the image. If you update your .JPG in PhotoShop Elements, adjust the lighting, crop it, etc., and then save it as a new version of that file, you’ll be happy to see that the metadata will be preserved (except for create date) in the new file. But if you modify the image in Gimp and save it as a new version, the metadata is lost in the new file. These are examples of just two photo editing programs. Do some experimenting on your own.

    My Methods

    Title and Caption/Description

    I use a handy little free program called Irfanview. I adjust my Windows settings so that this is the default program used when I double-click a photo from Windows Explorer. Irfanview can do a lot of things but I’ll just describe the metadata stuff. I double-click a photo and then press “I”, and then “I” again. The first “I” is for Image properties. The second click of the letter “I” is for IPTC info. Once in this screen, I update the Document Title and Caption and then press the Write button. Done!

    There are two categories of metadata, EXIF and IPTC. What’s the difference? Who knows? Just use IPTC.

    Editing IPTC metadata with Irfanview

    Create Date

    Now, what about the create date? If I’m working with a scan of old photos or old documents I usually don’t bother changing this date. It will be the date that the scan took place, not when the photo was taken. However, for my personal photos from my digital camera or phone, I like this to be the correct date so I can rename and sort my photos based on the date and time. Usually my camera puts in the correct date and time and I don’t have to do anything. But what about when the camera was wrong and you need to change the date or time?

    Here’s where it gets a little tricky. I haven’t found a lot of programs that let you modify this date. You would think that within Windows Explorer you could just right-click the file, go to properties, and fix stuff like this, but you can’t. For this, I use another program, PIE – Picture Information Extractor. They offer a freeware version but if you want editing ability you’ll need to purchase the commercial version for $29.

    Within PIE, I click on the thumbnail of the image I want to modify. Then I press Ctrl-S (or from the menu, Metadata, Set Date and Time. You can either enter the Fixed date and time or use the Difference option to adjust the date or time with an offset (for example you could set the time back 2 hours).

    The really cool thing about PIE is the ability to use the Auto Rename feature. You can set up a custom rename template and rename your photos based on this create date so your photos will be sorted sequentially on your hard drive with the date and time as part of the filename (something like 20160105_223915_01.JPG for year, month, day, hour, minute, seconds, and then a sequential number). This just makes the world a better place, right? No more vague filenames like DSCF39234.JPG.

    Changing Create Date with PIE

    Other Things To Consider

    Remember that some programs don’t preserve your metadata when you make a copy from the original. However, it’s easy to open two files at a time with Irfanview and copy/paste your text from one to another.

    There’s a free program out there called ExifTool by Phil Harvey that does about everything related to metadata. It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s a command-line utility. If you’re an uber geek and miss the good old days of DOS and writing batch files with parameters and such, then this is the tool for you! It can read, write, and edit metadata. You can almost think of it as more of a metadata scripting language than a “program”. It’s pretty cool but I only use it in special circumstances.

    Good luck and feel free to add comments so others can share from your wisdom.

  • File Naming Convention for Digital Photos, Scans, and Documents

    03/07/2014 – After writing this article in 2012, I have slightly modified my naming convention for the following reasons. I’ve made some updates to this article and crossed out my old conventions.

    • I didn’t like how long the file names were getting.
    • Often I didn’t know the date of the when the photo was taken. I was putting an estimated year, but I didn’t like doing that because then it’s sort of set in stone. Besides, I’m putting that information in the meta data of the photo so this seemed redundant.
    • I didn’t like trying to come up with a description of the photo. That can go into the meta data. I’m just numbering them sequentially now so I can get on with things.

    I often get stuck on the picky details of how I’ll organize things, but once I come up with a system, I love it because I can move forward and put it to work. Until I develop a system, everything seems like chaos and it can feel overwhelming. Okay, so maybe I’m a little OCD.

    One area that I’ve struggled with for a long time is coming up with a good file naming convention for the files associated with my genealogy research as well as the several old family photos that I scan. I’ve also struggled with how to organize my files into folders on my hard drive.

    My requirements for a good standard are as follows:

    • File names that would work whether all of the files are together in one folder or if they are separated into sub-folders.
    • File names that would work if photos were in the same folder as scanned documents.
    • File names that would work if photos of people were together with photos of places or objects.
    • File names that would indicate something about the image, such as, being the original full resolution scan, a re-sized version for the web, a thumbnail image, a modified image, or a portion of the original (cropped).

    After reading some other blogs on this topic, I took some ideas that I liked and formulated a naming convention that I think will work for me and meet the above requirements. Keeping with programmer syntax, I’ll explain my naming convention with square brackets [] to indicate required portions of the file name and curly braces {} to indicate optional portions, along with some examples.

    Also, I chose to not have spaces in my file names but instead use underscores. I went back and forth on this one. One reason I chose to not have spaces, is because I didn’t like the URL that DropBox creates when I produce a public URL, such as “…/Knight%20Calvin%20Photo.jpg” instead of “../Knight Calvin Photo.jpg”.

    Naming Convention (each portion is divided by an underscore _ character):

    1. {_} Optional underscore prefix if the file is not associated with a person, also “_Uknown” can be used when I don’t yet know the person, place, or thing.
    2. [surname / birth name / place / object]
    3. {first name}
    4. {middle name}
    5. {bYYYY} The letter “b” and then the year of the person’s birth.
    6. [YYYYMMDD] The date when the photo was taken (not scanned) or the date of the original document. For example, if the photo was taken June 15, 1945, this would be indicated by 19450615. If portions of the date are not known, replace with zeros. Even if the entire date is unknown, put in 8 zeros. This is for sorting purposes. Normally with genealogy the date format is something like “8 Feb 2012” but that style will not sort properly.
    7. [event / place / description] Whatever best describes this image or document.
    8. [999] A sequence number, even if there is only one, I’ll always use 001. This is NOT a version number. For photos, I’ll use 3 digits. For a specific document, I’ll use 2 digits (see examples below).
    9. {-image type code} These one-character image type codes (see below) will always be preceded by a dash character. The absence of this code would indicate that the image is the unaltered original. I suppose multiple codes could be used, but I don’t anticipate needing to do that. For example “-wc” would be an image that has been re-sized for the web but it is also a cropped portion of the original image.
    10. {version number} Only when needed and I chose not to zero fill the number. For example, “-w1” indicates that this is the 2nd version of the file that has been re-sized for the web. There would be another file with “-w” which is the first version. Confusing? I guess I went this route because often I won’t have multiple versions, so I didn’t want to force the number 1 until another version is created.

    Examples of image type codes (item 9 above):

    • -e = Edited or retouched, changes were made to the original. This is probably still a full resolution image.
    • -c = Cropped image, or a zoomed in portion of a document
    • -w = Web, re-sized for placing on a web page or sending in an email
    • -t = Thumbnail image
    • -n = Notations added, or maybe a circle, a box, an arrow, etc.
    • -r = Reverse side of the document/photo

    Example File Names:

    • Hall_Mark_Moroni_b1881_19040512_WeddingPortrait_01.jpg (unaltered original image)
    • Hall_Mark_b1881_Photo_001.jpg (unaltered original image, full resolution as it was scanned)
    • Hall_Mark_b1881_Photo_001-w.jpg (resized for the web)
    • Hall_Mark_b1881_Photo_001-e.jpg (edited)
    • Hall_Mark_b1881_Photo_001-t.jpg (thumbnail)
    • Hall_Mark_b1881_Photo_001-c.jpg (cropped)
    • Hall_Mark_b1881_Photo_001-n.jpg (notations/highlights/boxes/circles/arrows) (if cropped and notated, just choose “n”)
    • Hall_Mark_Moroni_b1881_19040512_WeddingPortrait_02-w.jpg (2nd photo from the wedding re-sized to fit onto a web page)
    • Hall_Mark_b1881_Photo_002-w.jpg (re-sized to fit onto a web page)
    • _USA_Ohio_Harrison_Georgetown_TownHall_1904_01-n.jpg (Photo of the town hall building in Georgetown, Harrison County, Ohio, taken in 1904. I’ve added my own red arrow (n=notation) to this image, pointing to the stained glass window. Yes, I’m making this stuff up.)
    • Hall_Mark_Moroni_b1881_19300000_1930USCensus_01-c.jpg (This is the zoomed in portion of the 1930 US Census page. I don’t know the month or day when the census was taken. Other family members are in this image but I’m listing just the father for the file name. In my genealogy program I’ll add the other family names.)
    • Hall_Mark_b1881_1930USCensus_01-c.jpg (This is the zoomed in portion of the 1930 US Census page. Other family members are in this image but I’m listing just the father for the file name.)

    Folders:

    There are several ways to organize the folders on your hard drive. Pick a system that works for you. For me, I’m separating photos and documents, and then by surname below those categories. For example:

    • Family History
      • Documents
        • _Other
        • Atwood
        • Knight
        • Massey
      • Photos
        • _Other
        • _USA_Utah_Uintah_Vernal
        • Atwood
        • Knight
        • Massey

    I hope these ideas might help you. The key is to find a system that works for you. I would love to hear your ideas. What has worked for you? What has been a challenge? Please feel free to share.