Collaborative Manuscript Transcription

I just spent about two weeks doing what's known in software engineering as a "spike investigation." This is somewhat unusual,...

What are the costs involved making FromThePage a going concern? I see these five classes of costs: DNS Initial hosting bills Marginal hosti...

It's been several days since I updated this blog, but that doesn't mean I've been sitting idle. I finished a basic implementatio...

Now that I've settled on the types of comments to support , where do they appear? What is commentable? I've given a lot of thought ...

Back in June, Gavin Robinson and I had a conversation about comments . The problem with comments is figuring out whom they're directed...

I've gotten a lot done on FromThePage over the last month: I finished a navigation redesign that unites the different kind of actions yo...

Let's return to the subject of money. If I thought the market for collaborative manuscript transcription software were a lucrative one,...

Inspired by Bill Turkel's bibliography clusters , I spent the last week playing with GraphViz . Here is a relatedness graph generated b...

Page/Subject Article Versions Last week I added versioning to articles and pages. The goal was to allow access to previous edits via a vers...

Sara and I spent about an hour yesterday talking about the Renan System's UI on our drive to Houston. For someone who is frightened and...

Well, that was fast! Four days after announcing that this blog would take a speculative turn (read "stall") while I spent months ...

Matt Unger has been kind enough to send his ideas on article links within transcription software. I've posted my plans here before, b...

Illegible tags allow a scribe to mark a piece of text as illegible with a tag, linking that tag to a cropped image from the text. The appl...

Of all the online transcriptions I've seen so far, Papa's Diary Project does the most with the least. Matt Unger is transcribing a...

I've just checked in transcription authorization, completing the security tasks a work owner may perform. I decided that owners should ...

I just tried out some simple filters in Rails, and am blown away. Up until now, I'd only embraced those features of Rails (like ActiveR...

Alice Armintor Walker responded offline to m y post on sensitive tags , asking: Do you think you might want to allow sensitive text access...

I haven't spent much time on this blog talking about vision or theory. Perhaps that's because blogger theorizing reminds me too muc...

Sensitive tags allow passsages within a transcription to be removed from public view — visible to scribes and work owners, but suppressed i...

For now, FromThePage has followed the classic funding model of the basement inventor: The lone developer — me — holds a day job and works o...

I've moved into what is probably the least glamorous phase of development: security, permissions, and user management. There are four (o...

As I said earlier, I've been making really good progress writing the kinds of administrative features that Rails excels at. Despite my ...

In my experience, really great software is so consistent that when you're trying to do something you've never done before, you can g...

Gavin Robinson has been exchanging emails with the UK National Archives this week. He's trying to convince the archivists to revise th...

I've downloaded and played around with FamilySearch Indexer , and I must report that it's really impressive. Initially I was dismay...

Zoom is done! It took me about a week of intense development, which translates to perhaps 8-10 hours of full-time work. Most of that was ...

Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter enthuses over the news that FamilySearch.com, the website of the Utah Genealogy Society of which D...

Both my friends Prentiss Riddle and Coulter George have suggested that I resolve my software name quandry by looking for placenames in Juli...

Scanners and modern digital cameras can take photos at mind-bogglingly high resolutions. The 5 megapixel Canon SD400 I've used to captu...

One of the main goals of the diary digitization project is to create printed versions of Julia Brumfield's diaries to distribute to fami...

Both Wikipedia and Pepys Diary Online allow hyperlinks to be embedded into articles. These links are tracked bi-directionally, so that by v...

Why should someone trust me with their data? Why should someone trust me with the fruits of their effort? By "trust", I'm no...

One of the first things I discovered when I started work on this project is that it's a lot of effort just to get the page images ready ...