Writing

Feed Software, technology, sysadmin war stories, and more.

Friday, May 25, 2012

A year of posting daily, and an announcement

Just over a year ago, I bailed out of my Silly Valley corporate job at a company which had gone to hell in a hand basket. At the same time, I started writing here. It was a little wobbly at first, since I was writing all of this stuff by hand.

I don't just mean the actual text, but the whole thing: creating the /w/YYYY/MM/DD/foo directories, formatting things as HTML, and yes, even wrangling an Atom feed, including figuring out the time in UTC. Every post I did was a feat of yak shaving, and it had an impact on getting things out.

Within a couple of days of freeing myself from the daily grind, I had written some software to do this for me, and the daily posts commenced. This started a streak that as of today, May 25th, is a year old.

I've managed to maintain this while working on software and hardware projects, and while traveling. It's probably the most important project I've worked on in a long time.

Today, I have something else to announce. Quite a few people have contacted me privately wishing that they could catch up on previous entries in some other way. After all, the Atom feed only goes back about 100 posts or so, and there are now over 500. As a result, I am doing something about it.

I have been organizing all of the 2011 entries into a coherent collection arranged by subject in preparation for a book. I intend to do this at least initially as an "e-book". If someone out there with a publishing press wants to make a deal with me to transform that into dead trees, I'd be game for that as well.

I've been putting a good amount of work into this. The entries will retain their images, external links, and even internal links. When one post references another, you can jump back and forth within the document. It's actually pretty neat!

The book is coming. Are you ready?


May 30, 2012: This post has an update.