Blog posts
Writing for fun and profit
I like to write. That’s why this website is here. But I’ve also written fiction, songs, a play, and a couple of technical books.
Publishing is harder than writing, I find. My first book, Electronic CAD Frameworks, was published by Kluwer—now Springer—(it’s out of print now, alas). Since then I’ve used lulu.com , which ...
More >The Art of Flows
Writing is a powerful and well-tested marketing tool. The use of extended written materials is a key part of much technical marketing: white papers, brochures, documentation, and more. Creating a whole book to tell the story of a product or capability is less common, but no less valuable.
Over the past several months I’ve been co-authoring a book with ...
More >RSS Feeds are the quick way to keep up to date
If your web site doesn’t use RSS, you’re missing out on a great way to increase your visibility. This technique makes your content available in a customized way to every reader who wants to stay up to date with what you have to say.
RSS stands for “Real Simple Syndication”—which may not help much. But it’s ...
More >The Django book is out
I’ve written before about the power of Django – it’s the engine that underpins this website. A lot of my learning came from the main Django website here, but now there are a couple of books available.
The first one of the two is better – it’s written by two of the creators of Django and it’s clear ...
More >What is Web 2.0 really?
60% of online news is now published by individuals, rather than by organizations, networks and commercial portals.
That’s a huge change.
I think the most useful aspect of Web 2.0 is the way these technologies connect individuals and enable individual voices to be heard on the web.
Web 2.0 is based on the realization that even if ...
More >How this site is made
There’s a new generation of web frameworks emerging that have built upon the experience gained from past systems. I’ve written about content management and LAMP before – Django is a LAMP-based framework that started its life as a publishing platform for a newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas. It’s built in Python, which provides a huge variety of built-in ...
More >Technology will let us live forever
Ray Kurtzweil is not only a respected technologist and innovator, he is also known as something of a futurist. His latest book, The Singularity is Near, argues that technology will radically change our experience of living, and will fix a lot of the things that eventually kill us. There’s a summary of some of the main points here.
It ...
More >Web 2.0 - Inside the Bubble
I had the chance to attend a panel discussion in London this week – at the Serpentine Gallery, in the inflatable bubble building.
The topic was Web 2.0 – the set of techniques upon which this site is based. The meeting was sponsored by Banner – a UK agency that’s part of the WPP group.
It was interesting because it shows ...
More >Links
- Harvard Business Review: Working Knowledge http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ - The Harvard Business Review publishes a lot of very well-thought out materials. Some of it is available in blog-like forms from the Working Knowledge site. There are articles on marketing, strategy, and a wide range of business topics.
