Category: Burningbird

Categories
Burningbird

Headers, Comments, and editing

I have been enjoying the Hubble headers. Of course, I have Hubble wallpaper on my machines, Hubble pictures on my walls, and books on Hubble, so no surprise here.

I’m not the first to use Hubble in site design and won’t be the last. A site can only improve with Hubble pictures.

Of course, the MissouriGreen site, which I hope to have up next week, will feature photos of Missouri. Naturally. Though I may try to sneak in some Hubble, as a reminder to Missouri folk that science is beautiful. Not that I would think people in Missouri would need this reminder.

My favorite of the headers? All of them, really, but I do have a slight partiality to this one.

As you may have noticed, I’ve turned off the ability to edit comments.

The approach I had developed worked quite nicely, but it is somewhat vulnerable. I’m working on a replacement that should be more robust. I may even throw in a little Ajax to provide for in-page editing, as well as a separate page for those with scripting turned off.

Categories
Books Writing

With appreciation

his week is the last week for editing on the new book, and the editors are just now finishing up. I wanted to thank the folks who gifted me with their time and effort; providing reviews, technical and other editing, and suggestions. I had a good group of people and the book is going to be a superior product based on their effort:

Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street was spot on with CSS, issues related to accessibility, as well as general markup and page design. He also managed to catch numerous typos.

Elaine Nelson of Emergency weblog provided not only tech editing, but also did an excellent job of content editing.

Roy Owens — not the singer. Roy also helped me on Learning JavaScript. Some people are gluttons for punishment.

Anne Zelenka of Anne 2.0 provided a higher level analyst view, as well as spotting gotchas, areas of confusion, and points of information that should have been included, but weren’t.

Jesse Skinner, from The Future of the Web who is an expert on unobtrusive Ajax, and is currently working on a Short Cut for O’Reilly on unobtrusive Ajax. Jesse specifically focused on the tech, and his extensive knowledge of the Ajax world was extremely valuable.

Anthony Holdener, who is writing O’Reilly’s Definitive Guide to Ajax, contributed edits for the first three chapters until he had to return to his book. I appreciate the extra effort.

Kathy Sierra, of Creating Passionate Users did a first chapter review and provided some excellent insight into refocusing the first chapter and making important points more discernible.

My main editor, Simon St. Laurent, of course. This is my third book with Simon. Did I mention, gluttons for punishment?

It is a lot of work to review a tech book. You’re not just reading the book, you’re:

  • looking for typos
  • looking for missed opportunities
  • watching out for uses of technology that could be improved
  • watching out for uses of technology that really need to be improved
  • helping to discover areas where the author has made a mistake (all authors make mistakes)
  • helping to sooth and tame wild, clumsy, and agitated phrases
  • doing all of this within the constraints of an awkward book template, under deadline, with an overly tired author

The editing team for a book is the author’s only support in what is a difficult task. They form the parachute when we’re free falling; the additional sets of eyes when our own are tired and strained. Of course, the editing team can also only do so much: in the end, whatever is missed is ultimately the responsibility of the author.

Thank you. Thank you all most sincerely, from the bottom of my book writing heart.

Categories
Burningbird

Known universe

I’m not sure why I’m getting 404 log entries for pages that WordPress serves. The material that mentions this online this seems confused. If anyone has any suggestions, I have ears enough.

I think I have all my redirects, other than managing a 401 document, which Phil suggested. That’s what’s causing the conflict between WordPress’ htaccess that ate the world and authenticated subdirectories.

I have too many categories, and need to merge these, and also provide redirects when I do. That’s the number one reason NOT to use categories in permalinks. Oh well, life needs challenges.

What I also need to do is create 410 gone entries in my .htaccess file for the permanently removed resources. Until finished, and until I recover from my merge, people will have to suffer through my 404 page.

Categories
Burningbird Technology

The wonders of S3

The only domains I’m keeping are burningbird.net, shelleypowers.com, and missourigreen.com. Burningbird is my major site, I’m turning the shelleypowers.com into an online CV, resume, what have you, and developing MissouriGreen more fully.

One unique feature of Missouri Green is that most of the site resources will be hosted on Amazon’s S3. I’ve already tried out S3 for a Flash-based photo show, and it works remarkably well. I figure that I can offload everything but the dynamic applications, such as whatever tool I use for the content. I’m leaning towards Drupal right now for the content. Drupal or WordPress most likely.

I’m using a variation of a Python script to bulk load to S3 from my server, but it needs work. I’m also using the Firefox add-on, S3 Firefox Organizer for loads from my desktop.

I’ve been enjoying myself immensely but I have to watch it: I’m almost up to a dollar in monthly charges.

Since S3 is a third party service, I’m not making it my key storage device. My photos I upload I have in RAW format on external hard drive and backup DVD. Same with the database dumps, as well as the code. If Amazon decides to enforce a minimum charge, or the service become less than robust, I have a plan to programatically recover the data and host elsewhere.

Categories
Writing

Short takes

The editing process can be fraught with possibilities for humor, especially when looking at typos. In one example, the text of the sample web site talked about “Poor the margarita into a glass”, leading to expressions of sympathy from my editors. My favorite so far, though, is “Transversing collections of data..” instead of “Traversing collections of data…”.

Alternate lifestyle code, indeed.

I’d already found the occurrence of “can’t” misspelled with a ‘u’ before sending it off for editing. Good thing, too, as editors never let you forget slips like this. Ever.

Speaking of geekery, OpenID is now the new cat’s jammies. For those new to this darling, all you really need is a bit of open source software and a URI, and it magically opens doors for you everywhere. I had an OpenID URI once but found it too blasè. I know what I really want, but unfortunately, iamgod.com, is already taken.