Personal Interests & Web Sites

Above left: American Radiator Building from Bryant Park, 5/18/2001.
Above center: Empire State Building from 34th Street, near Penn Station, enshrouded in fog 1/5/2001.
Above right: Sledders in Fort Tryon Park 1/1/2001. All come from my NYC pictures.

These are notes and links for my personal interests, while on the road or for sharing with friends.

Bookish: printing and publishing history; type and typography, especially after Caslon; fine press books; rare books and the book trade, especially Americana; fakes, forgery and facsimiles.
Letterforms and Writing: history of letterforms and writing, especially the changes in American writing from 1700-1850 as "round hand" gave way to "Spencerian" hands. (On my to-do list: create links for working on handwriting, especially stray textbooks that have been digitized.)
Digital Data Issues: Meta data, especially for web pages; accessibility to web sites for disabled users; SGML and databases on the Web; imaging and authentication of data; technological convergence.
Conservation and Historic Preservation: Conservation of paper, photographic and other materials; ethical, artifactual and aesthetic issues in conservation treatment or restoration; local preservation efforts.
Genealogy: genealogy and family history; technological genealogical standards and research tools; intersection between genealogy, local history and institutions.
Photography: I take a lot of photographs; most of them now digital. See my Galleries.
Other interests: English and Latin literature (see Humanities & Literature Links); textual editing; classical music and opera; the history of religion; photography and stereocards; local history of the lower Hudson region.

For friends and family: links to my photographs. Other personal interest pages:

Photo Gallery
Classical Music
Genealogy
Stereocards (and my collection--for use while traveling)
Rare Books
Flickr account (photographs)
Picassaweb (photographs; most of which are not public)

Why these pages

Most of these web pages started as notes responding to repeated questions from friends or researchers. From boilerplate text for e-mail I expanded the notes and eventually mounted them as a sort of online "Frequently Asked Questions." A few pages were mounted to share as preliminary research, although most of these pages were subsequently retired. The photo gallery pages shared some pictures and helped me learn about creating fast-loading web pages using thumbnail images.

The genealogy pages, both general links and personal, responded to questions, which ranged from basic how-to-start, to fairly complex queries (is your grandfather related to so-and-so). The short biographies helped to differentiate my line and were fun to write. I've met some wonderful people through these webpages. A number of such e-mail "meetings" resulted in an invitation to the Fort Greene Tomb of the Martyrs (offsite at Rootsweb). Thanks!

A few pages were uploaded as placeholders or online reminders for tracking personal collections when on the road. The Gallery has links to some, while the Stereocards page has others.

This personal site has also been a sandbox for trying out ideas such as those described in Research & Notes, such as Meta tags, DublinCore, imaging, and databases.

Web trick: Ideas that I haven't used here? I maintain this site by hand, with a text editor. However, the American Printing History Association website is maintained with Microsoft Frontpage. Frontpage's Scheduled Page feature is used extensively in the APHA website's calendar (especially the Regional Chapters). When an event is past, the same Scheduled Page feature will have the same event appear on a Past Events page. (Frontpage is using the SHTML feature available on most servers, but SHTML doesn't permit scheduling.)

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