Big Island Palm Tour - Donʻt Miss It

[Dypsisdean]

This is geared for members of the PSSC. Come one, Come all, to the Palm Tour of a lifetime. You will arguably see more species in less time than anywhere in the world. A webpage with all the info will be available soon.

There may be good deals on airfare for PSSC Members if we can get 10 or more from LAX or SAN.

[palmazon]

Palmdork Meeting now in session

[palmazon]

King of all dorks...

Dork Jr. to Dork King:
"Do you think that Macrozamia will ever get too big for my planter?"

[palmazon]

those in favor - raise your right hand

your other right, Meathead

[Dypsisdean]

Are we having fun yet?

[bepah]

I kind of feel left out....sigh....

[palmazon]

just a goof trying to generate some traffic -
if only we could rope you into our membership...

[Dypsisdean]

I've been telling you guys for years you should set up a limited online membership with access to your journal on line for those outside of SoCal. I even tried suggesting to the various Palm Chapters that perhaps a limited group online membership, with access to all the publications online, could generate some buzz and online members. Those in Europe or Oz would be able to take advantage of all the great info. And include the OZ and European publications for those in the Western Hemisphere.

Plus, if done right all the articles would be indexed and searchable in a data base. For example, search for "Livistona," and all the articles from all the publications would pop up for reference and research. It would be a tremendous resource. And pure profit for the chapters, because once on line it could be made available for 10 or 1000 IPS (Internet Palm Society) Members at virtually zero cost.

[palmazon]

Please give me some advice to get it started; if I wait to discuss it with my fellow boardmembers, it'll be years before we see results. We meet every other month - we barely make a quorum more often than not, and our entire meetings are generally consumed by pressing business like the journal, the treasurer's report, and the dismal membership numbers, the annual banquet, etc.

[Dypsisdean]

Danny,

I have talked about this with Jack several times. If you look on your PP Page, you will see some sample articles that he supplied me years ago. All that has to be done is to convert your finished Journal to a PDF format.

I offered to do this at one time, in exchage for being able to offer the content on Palmpedia. I had devised and purchased some methods for displaying the photos and text in high quality will keeping file sizes to a managable size. That is the key as far as I was concerned. Without quality photos, why go to the effort. For example, check out the online IPS journals on their site, and compare the quality to the ones I did for you. In fact, the ones you have on your PSSC website were "stolen" from Palmpedia. There are many tricks and procedures for compressing the PDFs and retaining photo quality. The main trick is separating the photos and text, compression each differently, and then putting things back together. Full size PDFs are to large, and the standard resizing options yield terrible results for photos.

So, if the Journal was already in the form of a PDF, it can be placed online in a matter of minutes. But I am guessing that unless someone really knows what they are doing, the PDF will not be as good as it could be. Again, compare the IPS with yours - specifically the photos, and especially when zoomed in on.

I am really busy at the moment with this Palm Tour and some other web matters, but I would probably still be interested in helping you guys out, provided Palmpedia could benefit from the web trafffic. Perhaps you could supply me with a completed older Journal someday and I can see how much trouble it is to make it look really good online without talking forever to download. Then I could post it for your review, and we could mutually decide if it is an arrangement we could live with. I would have to do some research on the indexing and referencing end of things, but I know it can be accomplished. And there are some newer methods for protecting the content these days as well. I know Don Hodel had some issues with his material being available online due to piracy issues. But he would be welcome to link to all his articles from his website as well.

If you like, we could talk by phone one of these days.