Tullis Trees, Vol. 5, No. 2: From the Editor

A Family History Newsletter
Volume 5, Number 2	2nd Half 2006

From the Editor

Thomas S. Tullis,
Editor

After much deliberation, I’ve decided that this will be the last issue of the printed version of the Tullis Trees newsletter. However, I will continue to publish new articles online (www.TullisTrees.org). Creating both the printed version and the online version, as I have been doing, is just too much of a burden. Technically, the processes of creating the two versions are quite different from each other. So it’s like publishing two different versions of each issue. My sense is that the online version reaches a much larger audience than the printed version, so that’s the version I will continue.

A large part of the problem, of course, has simply been finding the time to work on this newsletter. I have a full-time job so this has been an evenings and weekends endeavor. And for the past two years I’ve also been writing a book with a colleague of mine, Bill Albert, which was another evenings and weekends project. If you’re interested, the book is about the work we both do in the web usability field. It’s due to be published in March 2008 by Morgan Kaufmann Publishing. The working title is Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics.

Another part of the problem is that printing costs continue to rise. The cost of having the newsletter professionally printed and bound has never been covered by the subscription price, even after raising the price several times.

Since it’s actually in October 2007 as I write this column for the last issue of 2006, obviously I’ve fallen significantly behind in the publishing schedule. Part of what has happened is that I would grab a little chunk of time to work on the newsletter, perhaps finishing one article, but then the issue would lay dormant for months until I could finish the entire issue. That certainly happened with this issue, whose first article was finished months ago. By switching to online publishing only, my plan is to publish individual articles to the website as soon as I finish them. My hope is that this will make the process more timely.

I’m probably not giving up on some kind of printed version of this material altogether, though. Although I haven’t worked out the details yet, I plan to assemble the new articles into a printed book perhaps once every year or two. I will send out information about the availability of such a book to the email distribution list whenever I have it, and I’ll post information on the website.

As always, I’d like to encourage everyone to continue to send in material for future articles: old photos, gravestone photos, autobiographies, Family Bibles, etc. You can reach me at TomTullis@aol.com.

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