I’ve stated before that one purpose of this site was to hopefully make myself findable by other descendants of my ancestors. Well, this last week that happened! Someone named Mary from New York contacted me.

She was actually asking that I remove her and her daughter’s names from the site. I had accidentally left a book visible that shouldn’t have been.

It turned out though that we share a common ancestor about 6 or 7 generations back. She is stuck at the same place as I am on that family line, but it was nice to know that someone else is working on the family tree. :-D

As a side note for any techies, I’ve decided to use Drupal for the new site. I am cobbling together the various modules that will give the required functionality to the site, and it is coming along quite nicely. I have high expectations that many things will work better on the new site, including content search, image uploading (No more Java?!) and sharing content with others.

Thanks for waiting so paciently!

Warning: High nerd content in this post.

I’ve got a lot of cool new features I’d like to implement, but to do that, I’m going to need to make some back end changes. The biggest change is to move to use object oriented programming techniques instead of the patchwork of “hey, this is cool” that is currently going on.

I have looked into using the PHP Zend framework, but it still seems like overkill for what I’m doing, and I would have to first learn to use Zend, then reprogram the site. For now I’m just going to use the Object Oriented methodology that I know and already understand, and if the site grows too big for that, I’ll reconsider and MVC framework.

What all this means to you, as a normal end user, is that no new changes will apear over the next few weeks as I create the new site. If all goes well, you won’t even notice when I switch the backends, unless you check for a “it’s done” announcement here.

Thanks for all your patience,

Michael

PS. I got a job, and we made an offer on a house, so things are going to be pretty busy for me anyways.

More features!

Today brings you several things I’ve been meaning to do for a while…

1) Spell check now works!

There are two modes. Normal mode will give you an interactive spelling checker with suggestions and the likes. Genie mode will replace all words the spell checker doesn’t know with whatever the first suggestion is, it also does some basic clean up in hopes of helping the spell checker.

There is a ‘revert’ button next to the spell check buttons. Untill you click “Save Changes”, your text will not be updated!

2) Auto image enhancement!

The page enhancer uses unpaper to deskew and clean up your image for re-digitization. For it to work, you must first turn your the page so that the text is correctly oriented.

To use it, just check the ‘Auto-enhance’ checkbox and click ‘Save Changes’. Your image will be queued and should be enhanced shortly.

3) Color Inversion!

Got a scan of a microfilm? Flip its color to get better OCR results and make it more readable.

4) An undo button!

Did I hear an ‘oops’? Well now it’s OK, because none of the image changing operations will ever overwrite the original that you uploaded. The Revert button will remove all changes you have made (rotating, inverting, auto-enhancing, etc.) and restore the original just like it was before.

5) A ‘Don’t digitize this page’ checkbox!

Got some images which don’t OCR well? Maybe a graph of your family tree, or a birth certificate? Check this box to clear out the OCRed text and never OCR it again.

I hope these new features will keep everyone happy for a little while. If you have certain features that you want implemented, please drop me a line at stuporglue@gmail.com.