Where to find a host for thirty years of daily journal entries? (jpeg images)

Question

For over thirty years, Jacob Neidhardt (Neidhardt-9) kept a daily journal where he never failed to make a few notes about the day's events. All collected, his entries fill a 12" x 12" x 8" box of little pocket-sized booklets.  I have most of them scanned into jpeg images.  They are usually five years at a time with four days showing wherever a book is opened.  I posted an example of a typical page of entries on his profile.

My question has to do with how to present and where to find a host for these images.  I could make a page for him, but these are hundreds of images.  It could become a complicated presentation.  I could make a different page for every year or set of three to five years (depending on the book he was using at that time).  Maybe WikiTree is not the best or right host for these entries.  Maybe it is.  I don't know.  Other thoughts that come to mind might be RootsWeb.

They take a lot of data.  Uploading them one-at-a-time can be a chore.  I wish I could just FTP the whole folder up to the cloud, but I don't see how that could be an option.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Answer 1

have you looked at what would be involved in uploading it to the internet archive - archive.org?

Comments

No, Rob.  I never even considered that.  Archive.org is really the "go-to place" for all kinds of historical resources.  This is a great idea.  I use archive.org all the time to gain access to many old historical books. Thank you.  I will investigate this immediately.

Answer 2

If you are looking to publish it, either for public consumption or just to have a few copies for your own family, you might check out Createspace.com. I did my great, great grandmother's diary and also my father's letters home from WWII.

You would need to transcribe it and make it into a pdf file, I believe, and it's a lot of work, but doable. And extremely reasonably priced. You only pay for what you buy (or sell, as its a "print on demand" system. I actually sold several hundred of the diary, but I think only the ones I or relatives bought of the WWII letters.

But again, it's a lot f work, but doable. I'll be happy to give you more details or answer questions if you like.

Kay Jones

Comments

Thanks.  Uh, actually, I was just hoping to find a place to dump the images and open it up for comments.  Ah!  How about one of those free blogs like WordPress or Blogger?  There, I could comment all day long and open it up for social media, etc.  Then I could link to it on Jacob's profile.    ???

For I while I tried to transcribe them and ran into three hassles.  First, his penmanship plus his use of a stick pen made for some difficult transcription.  Often times, he would break into German and I don't do very well with German.  It took him over thirty years to write it in the first place.  I wonder how many years I would spend transcribing it.

Also, I don't want to kill any more trees.  The paper on these diaries is disintegrating. Digital data does not rot, but it can get deleted. Blogging companies get bought and sold and policies change.  I had these diaries up at fortunecity.com for a while and one-by-one the diary images began to change into little images of the fortunecity.com logo.  I will need to re-scan those pages where the images were destroyed.  I was very dissatisfied with their "free" service.  Geocities used to have many of the diaries.  Geocities is now gone.  Etc.  If I pay for a service, the images will be up there as long as I am alive and paying my bill.  Then they will be gone again.

8:30 am PDT Update:  Also, physical media change.  I had these on floppy disks, on CD-Rom discs, and on other media.  This is a big problem for everybody, not just for me.  When I was a kid, my dad had access to some of the earliest video tape in the early 1960s.  It came on a big reel and the tape was about two inches wide.  He arranged to tape the "Hocus Pocus" clown tevision show up in San Jose, California when my elementary school class went to be on the show.  Great.  Where will I find an Ampex video recorder machine that will play this tape?  See? This is a big problem.  All the while, the paper continues to rot.

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I like the blog idea.  It's a really fun way to share things like what you mention. I have letters between my grandparents that span about 20 years and have started a blog for them so family could see it all too.

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Thanks, Eowyn,

The more I think about it the better I like it.  I think I'll try it.

Answer 3

Does he mention other people? Wouldn't it be neat to load and tag them!

Comments

Great point. He mentioned lots of people. If I put the diaries in a blog, people could get involved.

The blog idea seems to be the way to go.  There is no room on the WikiTree profiles for such an extensive project, but we can make links on the profile to the many years which could correspond to pages (not posts) on the blog.  I will use static pages and avoid avoid blog posts because I will want to control how it appears in some kind of chronological order.  Blog posts tend to be ordered so that the more recent posts float to the top and the older posts fall below..

Answer 4

postimage.org is free and you can upload more then image at a time. you can also put the url code in posts to be directed to that image file.

Comments

Okay That's cool. Thanks. Can people comment on the images?

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It does not look like it. I am going to try something and will get back to you. \

 

Here is another way to do it. The site is http://www.wix.com. It is a free website hosting site and you can customize your site and add a comments section to the pictures. You can link to the site by adding a link to the profile of your choice.

 

Here is a site I made to promote a business for my mom and me.

http://eaglewolf573.wix.com/keenerscrafts

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Thank you.  I have worked with wix before and was very dissatisfied with their all Flash-based websites.  But they are free, and that is a big plus.

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good yesssss