The Post Office and British Broadcasting
The British Postal Museum & Archive has a an interesting post on electronic mail historically – The Post Office and British Broadcasting.
Not many people would associate the Post Office with broadcasting, but until 1922 it held a monopoly on electronic mass communication. When telegraphy, and later, the telephone were developed, the Post Office argued that it controlled anything which involved delivery from a sender to a receiver. Telegraph and telephone switching stations were defined as electrical post offices, with the messages or calls regarded as electronic letters.
Resource Page Update
The Resources Page has received a major update. Many new book recommendations for Online Publishing, Social Media and Web 2.0 are provided as well as books for new software programs.
Get Your Feet Wet with Web Pages!
Thomas Fortunato, Philatelic Communicator
Get Yourself a Web Page! Here are the steps anyone can do.
Step 1 — Find a Host : Find out if your own ISP (Internet service provider) offers free server space for hosting your pages. The code that displays a Web page resides on a computer hard drive somewhere in the world. When you type a Web address, otherwise known as a URL (uniform resource locator), you are actually hunting for the code on that computer. All code is written in a computer language called HTML (hypertext markup language). Most ISPs host Web pages, typically 10–25 megabytes in size — more than enough for your needs. If yours doesn’t, check such hosting sites as yahoo.com, tripod.lycos.com, or fortunecity.com. You have the option of signing up for their free ad-supported service (ads will pop up when viewing pages) or ad-free paid service starting at roughly $5 per month.
Step 2 — Decide How to Build Your Pages: To keep it simple, see if your ISP or web host offers free Web tools or site builders that make creating pages a snap. These programs typically are point-and-click and will step you through the process of selecting a layout style, background color or image, adding text and pictures, etc. from a selection of each that they offer. More advanced Web tools allow you to select these from your own computer, along with other elements such as music and video clips.
An alternative is to use a Web creation program on your own computer. You can create a page in recent versions of Microsoft Word and automatically convert it to HTML with the click of the mouse. Check out the File — Save as Web Page option or click on Help for directions. Otherwise, buy an HTML authoring program such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver, which can be expensive.
Web tools may not offer the flexibility in customizing the look and feel desire for your Web page, although today’s tools are much more flexible than before. To get the ultimate design in your mind’s eye, you may need to learn and write HTML code. Back in the dark ages (around 1997) this was my only option. This approach is not for the faint of heart, but if you’re game, check out such sites as htmlgoodies.com and arachnoid.com (HTML for the Conceptually Challenged).
Step 3 — Get at It!: Now the fun begins as you design your site. A few pointers. Remember that the “wilder” the background you choose, the harder it might be to actually read. Use complementary colors with enough contrast. Keep text to one or two styles at most, and in a font size that is easily read. The best advice is to scout out other web pages and use ideas you like.
Step 4 — Add Ons: OK, so you want to fancy things up? Consider adding a Web counter to tell how many people have visited your page. Some include other statistics detailing where viewers reside, when they visited, how long they stayed, etc. Want your own URL so that you look like a player, such as http://www.yourname.com? They’re as cheap as $5 per year if you look for them. So go ahead.
What are you waiting for? Get your feet wet with Web pages! 
Which Presentation Software Do You Use?
Defining Graphic Image Terms (1)
Building a digital philatelic study relies heavily on the use of graphics. Some of our readers may not be not familiar with terms used to describe graphic images or their properties, so let’s define some of these image terms in plain English.
- Image Format
Photographic images with colors/shades which blend into each other are best displayed in the ‘joint photographic experts group’ (jpg) format. ‘Tagged image file format’ (tiff) is good for photographic images as well, but the file sizes are very large and in most cases prohibitive. The older format of ‘device independent bitmap’ (bmp or dib) is seldom used as the sizes of the files are large, similar to tiff.Illustrations using line art or large single color areas are best displayed in ‘graphics interchange format’ (gif) format. This format presents the best option for small file sizes for this type of image. A newer format is ‘portable network graphics’ (png) which was designed for images on the internet and allows transparency.
A new type of file stored by many modern digital cameras is a ‘raw image file’. This image retains all of the data the camera lens captures and does not compress or throw out anything. It’s essentially a digital negative. There are any number of abbreviations for these images as each camera manufacturer has their own system for storing the files. Graphic manipulation / editing programs such as Photoshop will read these files, but some of the programs with more limited functionality may not.
- Image Resolution
Resolution is a measurement of how many dots are contained within a single square inch commonly referred to as dots per inch (dpi).Computer monitors typically display images at 72 or 96 dpi as a standard. If you magnify a standard dpi image on the computer screen, the image tends to become a bit fuzzy. That’s the result of the white space between the dots becoming more visible to the human eye. Make the image smaller and the dots squeeze closer together, making the image appear clearer.
If an image is prepared at 150 dpi, it will hold its clarity better than the standard dpi image when magnified slightly. The bottom line is: higher dpi levels allow greater levels of magnification while maintaining clarity. This is also a factor in file size as higher dpi images are larger and require more disc storage space than lower dpi images.
- Physical Size
Physical size of the image is simple. How many inches (or centimeters) wide or high is the image? This is not file size. - File Size
File size is how much disc space the image uses when stored on a device like a hard drive and is usually measured in megabytes (mb) these days. This is not the physical size of an image. - Image Optimization
Images can be optimized to produce the best image possible for their file size. That means it takes less disc storage space, appears quicker on the viewer’s computer monitor and maintains a reasonable level of quality. Optimizing is done through compression of the image. The process essentially discards some of the image data to reduce file size while keeping the most important data as much as possible.There is always a trade-off when optimizing images – file size versus image quality. We should opt for a slightly larger file size but we’ll get higher quality images that can be magnified slightly and provide the viewer a closer look at image detail.
Size of image displayed in various values
We’ll discuss focus and color in the next article.
Fossils, Saint Saens and Stamps
Generating Album Pages with Visio (2)
Ken Horner, Compulatelist
(continuation of the article Generating Album Pages with Visio Part 1)
Visio also creates files that a desktop search engine can index. So if I want to find the page with the Scott #200 layout I can just search for it. It makes life a lot easier now that I’ve got over 700 pages in the ‘Library’.
The Visio program itself is an engineering type drawing program more geared to diagrams than a paint or Photoshop alternative. As you can see in the layout below, it comes with the usual drawing grid and guidelines and the tool bars and menu items one expects to see in programs of this sort today.
Visio's Layout Grid.
Visio’s most unique feature is a set of literally hundreds of pre-defined drawing items organized into stencils. The ‘Basic Shapes’ stencil is view is shown. Using a stencil you can drag and drop a particular type of object onto your drawing and then adjust its size, color, line weight, and even add text.
The tabs along the bottom of the screen show the various pages inside the overall drawing file. In this case, the file is the collection of over 40 album pages covering 1900-29 issues. Being able to keep them all together and reorganize at will is very convenient.
The following image shows an album page without the stencil in view and expanded to 200% of printing size. Zooming in on objects and aligning them precisely is a key part of Visio’s appeal, as is its ability to embed pictures and other files generated outside the program.
Magnified Image in Visio.
The dotted line vertical in the right center of the page is an alignment guideline. Visio will let you automatically snap items to the grid itself or to the guideline. You can also glue items to a guideline, and they’ll move if the line moves.
For most of my work, the snap-to-grid method works well, as does Visio’s ability to line up a series of selected objects by clicking on each one and then selecting a shape tool for aligning them.
Wealth of Postal History Information Found on Internet
An article by William F. Sharpe in Linn’s Stamps News, August 17, 2009 describes using the internet to do postal history research with references to various sites.
The National Postal Museum [of the Smithsonian Institute] offers an exhibit, “Fifteen Objects That Changed Psoatl History.” Click on the link for exhibits at the top of the page, and then scroll through the exhibits listed to find this exhibit.
Generating Album Pages with Visio (1)
Ken Horner, Compulatelist
Reading an article by Martin Richardson got me thinking about my own efforts in creating album pages to display my collections. For some reason, I like having my stamps presented in interesting contexts as opposed to just using the tried and true stock book method. I guess it goes back to my using early Harris and White Ace albums when I was just getting started over 40 years ago.
I’ve tried a couple of the earlier page generation tools and ultimately settled on something I was more familiar with given my college summer job as a draftsman. I used Autodesk’s Autocad a decade back, but its current cost is out of line with hobbyist use. I’ve used QuarkXPress and Adobe Pagemaker for document production, and even gave Microsoft’s PowerPoint a go, but all came up short: too expensive, too hard to use, not enough typography support, etc.
I finally have settled on Microsoft’s Visio — although admittedly still not a cheap answer. An OEM copy of the not-the-latest version is available for less than $200. As Martin pointed out in his article, the graphical interface is essential; you have to see what you are going to get before you waste a print cycle. That’s what Visio gives me.
Sample Album Page Made with Visio.
After some trial and error, I’ve developed an overall approach that uses a general design style, templates, and copying pages to make life simpler. I started off by duplicating the simple format of a Scott US album to allow me to hold items that go back earlier than Scott supplies pages for. That’s worked out fine once I figured out how to deal with pages that weren’t 8 1/2″ x 11″. I’m working on my third album concept now to hold my Palestine Mandate collection.
This is an image of a standard page which is made up of two border elements, a collection title, page heading and text comments with stamp outlines and an explanatory graphic. The fonts and line colors and weights are all copied from one page to another to keep things looking alike.
Page copying may be the only hang up Visio has, in that selecting all page elements and pasting them onto a new page puts them in a “centered” position rather than at their original locations. But I’ve gotten used to doing a “select all” and then dragging them back to a known origin point. On the 10.6″ x 11.7″ size Lighthouse pages that I use, I get lots of room for stamps and images, but it does require me to keep a large format printer handy. I use an HP 9650 printer which easily handles the sheet size. I tell the printer it’s a B4 sheet size, and then adjust the Visio page margins to cope.
Sample Title Page with Images.
I also like Visio for its ability to do some more complex pages and not get into the out-of-capacity problems I’ve seen with anything except high end programs. A cover page example has several high density graphics embedded.
(continuation of this article Generating Album Pages with Visio Part 2)
