Recent Posts
Recent Posts Tagged With 'tools'
Collaboration in the Virtual World
As the Genea-blogger Facebook group grows and matures, its members are connecting to brainstorm ideas and develop projects that will benefit all of us. While Facebook helps us connect, it doesn’...
Diigo: Easy Tag Maintenance
Thanks to Diigo’s tag edit feature, I’m able to quickly scan the tags I’ve used to organize my bookmarks and clean them up. If you’re like me you’ve got several almost d...
Diigo on Facebook
As the genealogy community on Facebook develops, we are seeing many ways this platform can support us beyond the obvious socializing and networking features. One Facebook tool we can all use is the D...
Going Digital - Managing Documents
While the TIFF file format remains the undisputed champion for archiving images, it does have its limits for productive use. Actually, that’s a good thing. It protects the original image from ...
Going Digital - Managing Your Images
There’s been a lot of discussion in the genealogy community about digitizing our family collections. From scanner settings to file formats to backup strategies, we’ve learned how to creat...
Research Delivered - Beyond Newsfeeds
Now that you’ve mastered the basics of finding and managing newsfeeds using your newsreader, it’s time to kick it up a notch. You’ll be amazed at the things you can have delivered t...
Another Look at Grandpa’s Letters
Janet Hovorka’s series on Surviving the Digital Age is doing a fabulous job of reminding us how important archiving is. In addition to the paper/photo archives we are converting to digital, we ...
WeRelate Updates Search
WeRelate has updated their search component: We have new search functionality! Search on a variety of fields, sort by best-match (the default), by title, or by date last modified. Pages are indexed wi...
More PDF Goodness
Have you ever wanted to capture the contents of an entire web page? Screenshots won’t work when the page is larger than the screen so what do you do? Firefox users now have the ability to save...
Everything You Wanted to Know About Diigo
Emily Barney, a University of Illinois grad student (library science, I believe), has created a fabulous video overview of Diigo. In less than 10 minutes, you’ll discover just how useful Diigo ...
Research Delivered
We spend an extraordinary amount of time wandering around the Web looking for information on our ancestors. Now, add the growing list of fascinating genealogy blogs and social networking sites and yo...
Have It Your Way
We’ve had several discussions here about ebooks vs. paper books. While I still enjoy reading paper books, I find ebooks with their search capabilities much more useful for reference - especiall...
Share This
You may have noticed the little green ShareThis button at the bottom of each of my posts. It’s been there for a while because I thought it would be a great way to allow readers to pass on - or ...
Short Takes: Firefox Search Tools
This video tutorial demonstrates the Firefox search tools. Family researchers can take advantage of these tools to make their search efforts easier. A Firefox Search Tools Fact Sheet [PDF 1.2MB] p...
ISO approves PDF as an international standard
PDF joins Open Document Format (ODF) which was approved in 2006. OOXML, the format used by Microsoft Office, was approved in a vote earlier this year that is being contested by some of the countries...
Useful Firefox Addins
Now that the hoopla over Firefox 3 has died down a bit, it’s a good time to take a look at some very handy addons. Here are a few of my favorites: Forecast Fox. Puts your local weather inform...
Talk to your Microsoft Office
TALK TO YOUR MICROSOFT OFFICE. It appears if you have a copy of Microsoft Office issued since 2002 then, according to Lifehacker, you have the ability to “dictate, issue commands, and hear your...
Research on the Road: Essential Tools
We’re planning a family vacation that will include some great opportunities for family research. Besides getting my data organized to best take advantage of the trip, I’m putting together...
HOWTO: Another Diigo Blogging Tool
One of the downsides of using a hosted blog site like Blogger, WordPress.com or Typepad is the limited plugin options available. WordPress.com users were looking forward to a promised “related ...
The Copyright Slider
Thanks to Jill Hurst-Wahl at Digitization 101 for pointing me to the Copyright Slider tool created by the Office of Information Technology Policy (OITP) at the American Library Association. This simp...
Screen Capture
I’ve been fascinated by Terry Thornton’s maps used to highlight the people and places - past and present - from his Hill Country neighborhood. I asked him to show how he created those map...
The Diigo Movie Theatre
I’ve found Diigo is so much more than a simple online bookmarking system. For me, it’s organization for the chaos that is my family research, a delightful cookbook of recipes I find all o...
Research Delivered: Bloglines Search
For those of you unfamiliar with Bloglines, it is a superb online newsreader with many features especially useful to the online researcher. A while back I wrote briefly about Bloglines’ search ...
Mobile Research: Taking Notes
In December I wrote about taking notes with TiddlyWiki, a personal wiki application. My wiki and my tiny laptop have been getting quite a research workout this month and I’m finding the combina...
Research Toolbox: Skype Account
I can pick up my phone at any time and call the grandkids in California or friends in Germany or associates in Asia and it doesn’t cost me a dime. And, while I’m talking to them I can als...
Research Toolbox: Lulu Publishing Service
All of us have plans to publish our family history. Until recently, that has been a challenge. Either you typed and printed your original then had your local copy center make copies held together wi...
Research Toolbox: A Google Account
New to this year’s toolbox is a Google account. The main reason I have a Google account is so I can comment on blogs hosted at Blogger. It’s one of the most popular blogging platforms us...
Organize your digital files - the easy way
Sharon DeBartolo Carmack has a great article discussing systems for organizing your paper research [Battle of the Bulge, Family Tree Magazine, March 2008]. She’s also written a fabulous book on...
My Book Bag
One of the goodies Santa brought me was a new book bag. It’s less than 2 inches long and weighs about 2 ounces, but holds a huge library. Yes, my book bag is digital - a 1GB thumbdrive. Curr...
Research Toolbox: PDF Reader and Creator
The Portable Document Format (PDF) was created in 1993 by Adobe to provide a way for people to share documents regardless of the software used to create them. If I use Pages on my Mac to create a bio...