Nathan Torkington's Radio Weblog

Essential Blogging Tech Review Begins ...

Join the public tech review of Essential Blogging. Written by leading bloggers and developers (Cory Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott, and Mena G. Trott), the book aims to be a quick-start guide to blogging for technologically-literate people.

We've tried to adopt a "just the facts, ma'am" approach. I hope you like it. Please download the PDFs and send in your comments. Tell your friends--as we say in open source software, "many eyes make all bugs shallow".

Thanks!

--Nat

Radio Userland Chapters

The Radio Userland chapters are almost done. I'd forgotten how easy all-nighters are. It's the morning after the all-nighter that gets you ...

The Blogging Book Outline

"Where is this outline?" they say. Click on the OPML coffee cup to the left to subscribe to my outline, or use the address http://radio.weblogs.com/0106861/instantOutliner/nathanTorkington.opml.

IRC at Conferences

Dave suggests an IRC channel for each session. And one for the whole conference. So you can say "Hey my session is boring, are any of the others interesting?" Could lead to a mass exodus. We've done similar things in the past--I remember #perl discussions during the Allchin-Tiemann debate last year. Unfortunately that was a keynote and there was nowhere else to go :-)

OPML Transformations

Already I'm getting ideas for OPML. Dave says he's not maintaining his public OPML file because he's using another as his TODO list with many internal jobs, and keeping track of two files is too confusing. My thought: label each entry public or private, so you maintain one master outline and produce two derivative outlines from it.

Blogging Book Instantly Outlined

I've created an Instant Outline containing the structure (but not the content--there's a limit to how much Microsoft Word pain I'm willing to endure) of the upcoming O'Reilly Blogging book (working title: Essential Blogging, but that's currently being debated internally). No idea what the animal cover will be (all suggestions appreciated at blogging-feedback@oreilly.com).

The outliner is nice. I'd forgotten how much my programmer brain likes hierarchies. Programmer and editor, I guess--book and chapter structure is all figuring out what needs to be talked about in a top-down fashion then arranging the smaller concepts in the right order to fully cover the larger topics.

You know what it really needs, though ... revision control ...

Bio

I am an editor for O'Reilly and Associates, Project Manager of the Perl 6 Project, and content coordinator for the Open Source Convention. I coauthored the Perl Cookbook with Tom Christiansen. I'm a banjo player (influences: Earl Scruggs and Bela Fleck), a father (influences: my father), husband (influences: my wife) and a New Zealander living in Colorado.

Shift-Delete in Radio

I must have fat fingers--I keep hitting Shift-Delete, which in Radio pops up the world's most uninformative status window about windows. This is becoming as irritating as my emacs-programmed Ctrl-W reflex closing a window in Windows instead of deleting a word. It is time for my fingers to be rewired. Citizen Torkington, please present yourself to Neuronics Division for immediate reprogramming.