MemoryPress customers. We apologize for downtime felt today as our primary infrastructure provider, Amazon.com S3 has experienced serious request issues for hours. Please realize that your data is safe and taken care of, it’s only unavailable for viewing until service requests are restored.

For those interested in the status of the system, please visit the Service Health Dashboard for progress updates of Amazon Simple Storage Service. Amazon has historically provided a much more reliable storage solution than we did before switching to their service and we can assure you that they’re doing everything possible to restore service.

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I can’t decide if it’s Spring or not (it snowed yesterday morning in Idaho).

We realize how irregular we’ve become on our blog when Amy reminded us to post our latest press releases here.

We’ve been working with a great company out of New York City on a partnership that materialized yesterday. Here’s the press release.

Mother’s Day

Memorial Day

May is a wonderful month. Here’s a video (announcing the partnership) to inspire you in your efforts to preserve stories…enjoy!

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Great news from Flickr and the Library of Congress. They are offering 3,000 public domain photos to the web as creative commons. This means that most of these photos can be added to books or websites without copyright restrictions. MemoryPress currently allows you to add your own photos from Flickr. Who’d like to add photos from this historical collection? While anyone can download the photos from Flickr or the Library of Congress website and then upload them to their MemoryPress account, it would be possible to make them available inside your MemoryPress account so that you can drop them right into your book. What do you all think? Who would use this service?

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We thought our MemoryPress users would like to hear that we have just launched our Online Journaling Program called Pyxlin. Pyxlin is the smart way to journal. It was created so that people can keep their daily journal online in an easy-to-use, very secure format, and then have it professionally published when they are ready. Some of you may have heard of Pyxlin before. It has been around but, just this week, it was finalized and launched to the general public. It is ready for all journal writers to come and give it a try. Use it in place of your diary, written journal, or scrapbook. If you are already typing your journal entries on your computer, then you definitely need to give Pyxlin a try. It has so many benefits to traditional journals. Here are some of the great features of Pyxlin.

1. Your journal is password protected with a 256 Bit Encrypted Log-in (we’re talking bank quality security).
2. Access your journal from any internet connection in the world. No more forgetting to bring it with you.
3. Each of your journal entries is automatically dated with todays date - Or choose any date you wish.
4. You can organize your journal however you wish. Have a new journal for each aspect of life, or rearrange your entries with a simple drag and drop.
5. You can add unlimited photos to your journal. You can place them directly into your journal entry, or have an entire page of photos. No more journals with loose pictures or ticket stubs falling out. Simply scan them and drop them right onto the page.
6. 37% of journalers have lost their journal. This is one journal you CAN’T lose. House fires, computer crashes, they won’t matter. We have all your information safely archived in 3 places.
7. Once your ready, Pyxlin will professionally typeset all your text and photos, and you can publish your journal into a professional hardbound book.

If you haven’t tried Pyxlin before, you’ve got to try it now. With your MemoryPress login you already have access to Pyxlin. Click the word Pyxlin in the upper right hand corner of your account and start a journal today.

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Neal and Amy will both be presenters at the annual Association of Personal Historians conference in Nashville, Tennessee, November 8-12, 2007. Neal will speak on “Smart Publishing” and Amy will give two presentations: “Mining the Web for Personal History Gold” and “From Shoeboxes to Books: Writing Great Personal Histories”.

FamilyLearn is sponsoring a one hour demonstration of MemoryPress at the APH conference, on Friday, November 9, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the Franklin room. We invite all personal historians to attend.

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Thank you to Mary Slawson and Jackie McKay for a great interview..you asked great questions (Mary, I was impressed by the depth of your research) and it was fun to speak with you, Jackie, between the breaks. For any readers who weren’t tuned into Relatively Speaking on KSL Newsradio, you can listen to the podcasts for the MemoryPress show here and here (it’s split into two parts). Relatively Speaking is a great weekly resource for those interested in finding their ancestors. There is an audio archive for recent shows.

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So in case you didn’t notice, we haven’t posted an update in quite some time. Things have been really busy around here. We’ve had lots of changes, and they’ve all contributed to great things. I wanted to tell everyone about a really cool new feature we’ve implemented.

Before now, your guests could see the contents of the book, but only in text form. They didn’t see the nicely laid out pages with all the photos. We’ve changed this so that your guests can actually turn the pages of the book and see it the way you do. It’s amazing! It really helps give your friends and family an idea of what you are working on, and inspires them to contribute to your project. If you want to check it you you can look at one of our example books:

www.memorypress.com/start
ID: jana
PW: nelson

You will get to see the real book, and how much easier we have made it to Contribute to the book. Try it with one of your own books as well, and let us know what you think of the change. Our goal is to make books that can be easily shared with family and friends, and I think this new feature has really accomplished that.

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A number of bloggers have thoughtfully reviewed MemoryPress and we want to thank them for getting the word out.

• Buzzy Diz Biz [english]
• Dhyan Atkinson (I met Dhyan back in 2004 and she’s a wonderful teacher of sales and marketing skills)
• Duane Johnson (Brilliant engineer who always comes to work with a smile…he who makes the rest of us look good at FamilyLearn…check out his blog for great Ruby & Political insights)
• The Genealogy Guys gave us a mention. (These guys have the longest running genealogy podcast)

We sure appreciate the posts. Finally, over the last couple of weeks, we’ve begun building web pages for specific books where the MemoryPress system shines. As I built the pages, I asked Liz to email a few customers who completed similar projects. The responses from customers began rolling in that very day. I only have time to post a few of them…but thank you to all.

“Wow! It’s hard to describe the delight and surprise that Dr. D felt when he opened his farewell iMemoryBook book from the Department of Ophthalmology. As a member of our staff for over 20 years, we wanted a gift that was really special and reflected our appreciation, our respect, and our esteem for this well-loved physician. This book was perfect!” - Sally Goldin, Personal Historian

“First, let me again express my deepest THANK YOU for helping me with my dad’s 80th Birthday Book. You can be assured that you will be getting many, many new orders from people that I have spoke to and who have seen the book. There is no way that anyone can hear tales of the book and picture it in their heads. Once they see it, they can not believe the professional way it is done. They all expected a “scrapbook” type book. You have exceeded all of our expectations. I now tell everyone I am an accompished author! My dad was driven to tears!! In a great way not only for his surprise party, but once we presented the book to him, we all cried. Not one of us can read it with crying a river. Again, thanks!!” - Kathy Smolen May

“I’ll never forget one Sunday afternoon in spring when my Mom, brother and sisters were all together on conference call. I was sitting in a cafe on the West Coast, they were in the Midwest, and we edited the book together, in real time, on our respective computer screens. Ah, the magic of the internet! …Everyone was impressed with how professional the book looked, especially with the padded leather cover. Then as we turned the pages, the memories came pouring back. Everyone wanted a copy for themselves, and ordering them was a breeze. Our whole family thanks you from the bottom of our hearts. I did quite a bit of online research trying to find a publisher who could accommodate our blend of words and poems and B&W snapshots and color photos. This was much more than a photo snapshot book, and much more than a collection of writings. Being able to blend the two so freely made all the difference. “ - David Cates

“The family is very happy with the book. Mom has showed countless friends who were pleased too, a few were very envious. “ - Patricia

“It was the highlight of their 50th anniversary party! We used it as the guest book. Everyone wanted to sit down and look at it! My mom and dad were both brought to tears when we presented it to them and mom told me the other day that dad has read it cover to cover 8 times now in the 6 weeks or so since the party and cried every time!” - Barbara

”

“I was so pleased when I opened the package containing my first MemoryPress book. It was all I expected it to be—and more! FamilyLearn’s MemoryPress system was the perfect way to create a special heirloom gift for my one-year-old grandson. It was easy putting together a professional looking book with dozens of my favorite family photos. By just changing chapter headings, I adapted the template for the baby book to meet my individual needs. The variety of custom photo pages allowed me to arrange my pictures in interesting ways that worked well with the text I had written. Because of the flexibility of the MemoryPress system, I was able to creatively layout the book exactly as I wanted. I can’t wait to finish my next book.“

Dawna Curler, Personal Historian

Backward Glance: Research, Writing, and Personal History Service

These remind me that no matter the difficulties we face as a small, growing company, we are helping families in a very noble work. They also remind me what great customer service we have. Special hats off to our customers and what they’re building for future generations.

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Thanks to Cheryl at Blooking Central for helping to clarify the mashable article. Check Blooking Central out…
Says Cheryl, I intend for Blooking Central to be “Everything (eventually) that you could want to know about blooks: how to blog with an eye on getting published, software for converting your blog, and publishers/agents/editors that might be interested.”

We know some of our customers have intentions of selling Memoirs they publish on MemoryPress and we recommend you keep up with Cheryl’s insights.

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We’re happy to launch a browse and search interface to FamilyLearn, the world’s most enjoyed family story library. We’re in the process of migrating thousands of photos and books from the previous system and so not all the content is showing up in searches at this time. It will soon.

Two notes of interest.

First, we’ve only launched title-based search. People, author and full-text search will be added in the future.

Second, we’ve made all the books private by default (except for invitees of course). Some of you may want to share your history with the world. You can do this by searching for the title of your book, clicking on “Edit Public Information,” and deselecting “Make book contents private.” Finally, click “Save” and your done.

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