Publishing

New Wikipedia Subject: Kathy Sierra

All of the talk about last week's BlogHer conference reminded me of an effort I began last December to add overlooked female technologists to Wikipedia. In a discussion with Shelley Powers, I said that the encyclopedia is one area where gender disparity is easy to rectify. Someone just has to take the time to write comprehensive, neutral biographies that will pass muster with the site's editors. A person's presence in Wikipedia tends to attract new bios for people of similar background and ... (read more)

2006/08/02

Writer Tells Wikipedia He Got a Divorce

I fleshed out a placeholder entry on Wikipedia this morning, giving the Richardson, Texas, high school where "Jeremy spoke in class today" enough substance to inspire future editors to work on it. I've made around 150 edits to Wikipedia in the past year, most extensively on new bios and the unspeakably hideous "alcopop" drink Zima. Starting new subjects is a lot more fun than defending existing ones from vandalism. My Drudge Retort coconspirator Jonathan Bourne and I worked on the Zima entry as ... (read more)

2006/05/04

Russian Novelist's Biggest Mystery: His Identity

There's an interesting profile in today's San Francisco Chronicle about Grigory Chkhartashvili, a Russian translator and intellectual who was inspired by boredom to start a new career as mystery novelist Boris Akunin, the creator of the kickboxing, czarist-era Russian detective Erast Petrovich Fandorin: His novels ... wear their period politics lightly. Each plays on a familiar genre. There's the contract killer, the spy and the picaresque swindler. There's a closed-room mystery. And the sixth ... (read more)

2006/04/30

RSS: The Joy of TextInput

I've written 21 computer books in the past decade, documenting thousands of subjects in tree-killing detail. One of my pet peeves as a technical writer is covering something that readers are unlikely to need and should never, ever use, like the discussion board component in FrontPage 2000. I devoted an entire chapter to it in Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft FrontPage 2000 in 24 Hours, a mistake I rectified in subsequent editions. (Buy a copy of the book on Amazon.Com for 92 cents!) FrontPage 2000 ... (read more)

2006/03/29

The Lion, The Witch and The Arms Dealer

I took the boys last night to see Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Film Franchise We Hope Will Be a Cash Machine Like Harry Potter. The film's a wonderfully realized vision of the book, at least through my hazy recollection of tearing through all seven novels 25 years ago in the Collier boxed set, which I've kept all of these years. But the logic of the C.S. Lewis novel makes less sense than it did when I was a child. I don't care if they're just a bunch of dissident animals ... (read more)

2005/12/22

A Toast to Computer Book Authors

Whenever a new biography is added to Wikipedia, an "articles for deletion" debate is likely to happen on whether the subject is notable enough to merit inclusion. If the subject's a computer book author, you invariably get a comment from a Wikipedia editor like the one that was just made about best-selling O'Reilly author Shelley Powers: I really don't believe that authoring a how-to technology book makes one a notable author. We might as well have articles for writers of toaster manuals. He ... (read more)

2005/12/22

UserLand Frees Up Manila Servers

UserLand Software is discontinuing free Manila hosting, as I discovered last week when one of their users sought refuge on Buzzword.Com. Edit This Page shut free service on Dec. 1 and ManilaSites will do the same Dec. 31. I can offer free hosting on Buzzword, but webloggers who are committed to publishing with Manila should be advised that I'm migrating the server to new software by May 1, 2006. A better long-term option for those folks is to subscribe to Weblogger.Com or UserLand. (As an ... (read more)

2005/12/05

New Book: Programming with Java in 24 Hours

I just launched the web site for Sams Teach Yourself Programming with Java in 24 Hours, my 21st computer book since I began writing them in 1996. I'm not sure how this happened. I went to college to learn interpretive dance. This is the fourth edition of the book, updated to cover Java 2 version 5. I wrote the first in a 17-day haze in 1997, covering Java 1.1 and its class library, which is less than one-tenth the size of the Java 2 class library today. Over the years, the book has grown to 558 ... (read more)

2005/11/29

Losing Page Rank with Two Site URLs

I've been tracking the Google page rank of my web sites for the past year, trying to learn about effective, non-abusive techniques that improve their positions in search engines. You can really see a difference in a site's traffic when it goes up in rank. SportsFilter jumped to PR 7 in the last three months, and the site's membership is booming as a result. A lot of publishers are losing page rank because they use two different domains -- one that begins with www and one that doesn't -- for the ... (read more)

2005/10/19

And the Booker Goes To ...

There aren't many instances where I wish the American Revolution had turned out differently, but the yearly award of the Booker Prize for Fiction is one of them. Our former rulers treat an annual literary contest with the pagaentry and hype that the U.S. bestows upon Survivor finales and the joyous day Tom Cruise announces that he has anointed his next bride. Advantage Britain. The Booker's such a big deal there's a tell-all book coming out about the contest, written by departing administrator ... (read more)

2005/10/11

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