My Web 2.0 Blogging Book is Here!
Well, it took me about six months longer to write that I’d expected, but How to Do Everything with Your Web 2.0 Blog is finally available. I got my author copies the other day, and I just noticed that Amazon is live and shipping. The book covers choosing a blogging application (I cover Blogger, TypePad, ExpressionEngine and, of course, WordPress) and then goes into some depth with customizing the blog’s design, multimedia offerings, headlines and so on and so on.
The book focuses mostly on incorporating existing Web 2.0 content into your blog and extending it onto the Web using social bookmarking and other services, and it even has a chapter that goes into how you can make money from your Web 2.0 blog. (Step One: write a book about Web 2.0 blogging. No, I’m kidding. Don’t do that. Less money for me.)
The one thing to watch out for in the Amazon description — I don’t know where they get that stuff…probably from the proposal. The book doesn’t really cover much PHP or AJAX scripting, as I figured out early on that I couldn’t fit that in a 400-page primer. Still, it lives on in the Amazon description, mocking me forever.
Anyway, if you’re interested in getting started with a blog and would feel more comfortable with a book by your side, check it out!
Numbers…Cool Little App
I just got a copy of iWork 08 in the office today and decided to install it during some downtime this afternoon. I had to write a short piece for the paper and thought it’d be fun to do it in Pages.
So, I did. Worked fine, although I was a bit dismayed to find the Word Count (a vital feature for newspaper writing) in the Inspector window instead of in the Status Bar at the bottom of the window.
Otherwise, no complaints.
Then I played with Numbers. I’ve never been much of a spreadsheet guy, although I do use them when I can’t avoid them. (That seems to be more often than not with the Film Society, not with the JFP where most of the financials are done in MYOB AccountEdge. But, I digress.)
What impressed me immediately was the graphical nature of Numbers, which made working with the spreadsheets I needed to create (a very small budget and then a list of our film society’s board members — I was filling out a grant application) fun to do. I got through those two sheets and decided to play with the templates.
While they’re cute and fun, I tired of the built-in Numbers templates quickly. So, I decided that I yearned (yearned!) for others. I found my way to Numbers Templates, a fun little site where people are posting a variety of different templates for Numbers. The programming for these things can get pretty sophisticated and, even more to the point, the sheets created tend to be attractive and fun to work with.
Like FileMaker, Final Cut, and Keynote before it, Numbers may be the “killer implementation” of an app for creative Mac users because it focused on both the mundane and the aesthetic. Suffice to say that I’m going to continue surfing for spreadsheet templates to play with — and that’s not the sort of thing I would have said, er, yesterday.
Order My Book
Technorati
