Here is another glowing blog review: AnceStories: The Stories of My Ancestors: A New Wedding Memory Album by MemoryPress. Miriam just started a wedding memory book.

My favorite part from Miriam’s review:

Now I have to say that first of all, the technological support at MemoryPress is fabulous! …The friendly, patient, helpful service was a wonderful example of the support customers are certain to receive from this company!

I can hardly wait to get started…

Thanks Miriam!

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Myrt, from DearMyrtle.com, interviewed Jeffrey and me about MemoryPress and FamilyLearn (listen to just the section on MemoryPress below) this morning after deciding she would use MemoryPress to publish her family history. Myrt has tried publishing books on Blurb and LuLu; she loves MemoryPress because she can collaborate with family and friends to create her book. Everyone sees the book come to life and she doesn’t have to do it alone.

Mryt is sharp, fast and informative. She really does a ton of work for her readers. This podcast is worth the listen and DearMyrtle.com is worth subscribing to. (UPDATE - after posting this podcast, our customers and others let us know what an honor it is for Ol’ Myrt to choose us for publishing her family history as she is one of the top genealogy bloggers/speakers in the world of 12 years - Jeff and I are glad we didn’t know in the interview or we would have felt pretty nervous.)

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For those of you who don’t know yet, MemoryPress is a service of FamilyLearn. FamilyLearn is going to be the world’s most enjoyed family library.

Last night we changed FamilyLearn’s tag line. It is now “your family library”. Previously it was “heart to heart”.

Why did we change it? “heart to heart” can mean just about anything, therefore it basically means nothing. “your family library” on the other hand, is descriptive and clear. It fits FamilyLearn’s Mission.

Take a look at the Mission Statement of FamilyLearn:

Our Mission

To help you strengthen and unify your family by inspiring and enabling you to preserve, search, share, and learn from life’s stories.

Our Values

We operate our company based on:

• Tender Lovin’ Customer Care
• Exponential Improvement
• Accountability
• Respect
• INtegrity

Our Team

We absolutely value each other and always enjoy a good laugh.

Our Vision

To be the world’s most enjoyed personal and family story library.

MemoryPress and pyxlin are actually just parts in the mission, and vision, of FamilyLearn. Every story and photo recorded into a book or journal is stored on servers in FamilyLearn’s database. This way 10, 20, or 50 years down the road you, your kids, or your grandkids, will be able to get online and search FamilyLearn for keywords.

For example, lets say my kids got online 20 years from now and made a search for “integrity”. FamilyLearn—kind of like Google but private and for your own family—would pull up my story of “integrity”, my mom’s story of “integrity”, my grandpa’s story of “integrity”, etc… And every other story of “integrity” in our family library!

We invite you to come and help build the world’s most enjoyed family library.

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I love to watch people’s eyes when they first see MemoryPress in action. I think that MemoryPress helps us realize some of the wonders, miracles really, of the Information Age. Who would have thought 10 years ago that it would become possible to collaborate with family members from all over the world to pull together cherished memories and then publish them into a beautiful hardbound book. The thought never even crossed my mind.

Today I got into a dialog with “Ol’ Myrt” from DearMYRTLE, Your Friend in Genealogy blog. I will be doing a Podcast with her tomorrow. She will be asking me a lot of questions for her listeners. Her podcast is growing and has between 300 and 500 regular listeners. I will keep you updated.

As Ol’ Myrtle reviewed our site she had some wonderful things to say:

this is an incredible website… thanks for sharing. The more I see about your site, the more I like it.

OK, I gave up – and LOVE your site. I am really getting excited, and HAD to share it with my readers.

Those are just the good parts of our conversation, after Ol’ Myrtle struggled with out blog RSS feed, links at the bottom of the page, and a few other things I so commonly overlook.

Here is the newletter that she sent to her subscribers! Thanks Ol’ Myrtle! Even though I have not met Ol’ Myrtle in person, I think we will be good friends.

UPDATE: 300 to 500 podcast listeners doesn’t include RSS Feeds through iTunes etc…

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Mashable (currently ranked 13 among blogs worldwide) wrote a little article called: “MemoryPress Lets You Create Online Scrapbooks” early this morning. It is great to be recognized, even if MemoryPress isn’t exactly an “Online Scrapbook”.

I am not a “scrapper”. A couple years ago I made the mistake of relating what is now MemoryPress to scrapbooking. My sister corrected me, “scrapbooking is about the little bits and pieces, the glue, and the cutting. The scraping part of it makes scrapbooking fun.” Here is Wikipedia on Scrapbooking:

“Making scrapbooks is a hobby relating to pasting newspaper clippings, magazine articles, photos, usually personal, or other memorabilia into custom-decorated albums, or scrapbooks.”

Online or digital scrapbooking makes little sense to me because it takes the “scrap” out of scrapbooking, leaving us with just booking.

MemoryPress is a typesetting system, like a user-friendly version of TeX, Adobe InDesign, or QuarkXpress. MemoryPress is built to help you professionally publish your personal or family history with ease and very little cost. Because it is web-based MemoryPress allows online collaboration with your family and friends.

A few days ago Max mentioned that we seem “obsessed” with book quality, and typesetting. I told Neal that I think this is great! Other than writing your personal or family history there are just a few things that really matter when you are publishing your personal or family history. Two of those things are: how professional your personal or family history is going to look (typesetting), and how long your personal or family history is going to last (your book binding).

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Have a blog? Be one of the first to review MemoryPress! We will link to the first 50 blogs that write about MemoryPress and we will link to any blog that writes a review on MemoryPress.

We need all the feedback we can get on MemoryPress, positive and negative. We could also use some links to make it so that MemoryPress shows up when people are searching for us on Google. We would love your help.

The first 50 blogs to comment on MemoryPress will be noted in our blog.

ALL reviews of MemoryPress or MemoryPress family history books will be quoted and linked to on the customer reviews section of our website.

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We wanted to learn how strong our books really are. We printed a 200 page generic book on MemoryPress and put it to the test. 45 minutes in an industrial dryer!

Watching myself destroy this book was a humbling experience, I hate seeing myself on film! I kept saying to myself, “I know I am better looking than that”. haha.

Lucky for me my roommate Devin Graham is a film major here at Brigham Young University. He has created his own brand Devine Films.

He just created a 110 min “mocumentary” (pretend documentary) on dance. It won first place among 3000 contestants at iFilm.com. Here is an introduction to his documentary.

Thanks Devin for the help in creating this film!

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Below are our first attempts at creating visual tutorials. We will be posting them inside the help soon. Sorry about the low resolution, that is what we get when we use YouTube. But I am even more sorry that you have to listen to my voice in all but one of these. Next time I will try to add some more variety to them

Tutorial 1 - Edit Table of Contents

Tutorial 2 - Add a Memory

Tutorial 3 - Add a Photo

Tutorial 4 - Add a Photo Page

Tutorial 5 - Choose Your Cover

Tutorial 6 - Change Layout

In the next weeks, as we add features and make changes, we will be redoing these tutorials. But for now let us know what you think.

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How many usernames and passwords do you juggle? With OpenID you keep it to just one!

OpenID is a new optional way to sign in at any FamilyLearn website.

Have you ever felt sick of trying to remember usernames and passwords for all the websites you frequent?

OpenID is a great way to have only one username and password while visiting tons of cool websites (none quite as cool as ours, of course).

Why I want OpenID:

My friends think I have turned into an Internet Geek. It’s true, I love the Internet. But I have one major problem with the Internet. It requires too many dang IDs and Passwords! I believe this is the single greatest barrier for online applications to grow.

On the web I regularly use accounts on Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, MSN or Live, Ask, AnswerBag, Wikipedia, MemoryPress, Facebook, Joost, Skype, Ebay, LinkedIn, Zoho, QuestionPro, YouTube, Digg, Reddit, PayPal, My Bank, My Blog, Pyxlin’, Brigham Young University, Apple … sigh … these are just the places I visit regularly, I couldn’t even count ALL the places I have ever created an account with.

How is anyone supposed to keep all those usernames and passwords straight, but still keep them unique enough to keep their identity from being compromised? EASY! OpenID!

How to use OpenID on MemoryPress:

You may have noticed this OpenID logo on the signin page:

Ok, you probably didn’t notice it yet, take a look to the right side of the screenshot below:

If you click on that little OpenID logo you will see this spot to sign in with OpenID:

OpenID to be used by Firefox, AOL, and Microsoft:

I am VERY excited about using OpenID because it makes it so that I don’t have to use a different username and password for every site. THAT’S RIGHT!

You don’t have to use OpenID but if you want to you can. Here is a blip about OpenID from Wikipedia:

“OpenID is increasingly gaining adoption among large sites, with organizations like AOL acting as a provider. In addition, integrated OpenID support has been made a high priority in Firefox 3^[1] and Microsoft is working on implementing OpenID 2.0 in Windows Vista.^“

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MemoryPress has a support forum. This forum is a MemoryPress community where YOU can help one another, share tips and tricks, and offer suggestions to improve MemoryPress.

1. System Annoucements - You will be able to see how others are responding to the new system changes and voice your opinion.
2. How do YOU use MemoryPress? - You can ask questions, then share ideas that you have used to create your MemoryPress books. For example, you could ask, “Does anyone have ideas on what kind of things to put in a Baby Memory Book?” Then people will respond with ideas they have used and helpful links to other website resources. Give it a try!
3. Feature Requests - Is there a feature that will make MemoryPress better for us all? You can request new features and see what others have requested.

4. Troubleshooting and Bug Reports - Having a hard time figuring something out. Come and ask the MemoryPress community for help. Look and see if others are having the same problem. Once you are an expert, help others who are just starting.
5. Miscellaneous - Anything else on your mind? Let us know here.

I am getting married in October, so I asked my first question this morning. I need some ideas for Wedding Memory Books. You can get started by helping me find ideas to make my wedding book better.

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