Copyright ©1997-2008 Glenn Fleishman except as noted otherwise. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact Glenn Fleishman at glenn at glennf.com. Photo © 2008 Laurence Chen; used with permission.
Copyright ©1997-2008 Glenn Fleishman except as noted otherwise. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact Glenn Fleishman at glenn at glennf.com. Photo © 2008 Laurence Chen; used with permission.
Turning technology from mumbo-jumbo into rich tasty gumbo
� You Can Werblog, But You Can't Werhide | Main | C'mon, Eve, It's Just a Macintosh �My co-author and I delivered the electronic files yesterday for Real World Adobe GoLive 6, a 900-page opus for intermediate to advanced users of the program, or those that want to reach that status in life. The last three months have been an increasingly intense focus on the book as we wrote tens of thousands of words, tested features, double-checked our conclusions, and laid out the book. We work as book packagers, creating the entire work from start to finish with input from our publisher, Peachpit Press, which has ultimate responsibility for the title. But we hire a copy editor, indexer, artists, etc., and deliver a final result.
We hooked our star to GoLive a few years ago, and this is the third edition of the book. Do I want to spend so much intellectual energy on a single software product? Yes and no. It's worthwhile, as we know the program so well, and we're in the revision stage. In this release, Adobe added substantial database/scripting language integration, so you can write PHP-based queries to MySQL through graphical drag-and-drop (or JSP or ASP, etc.). I learned quite a lot about database management and scripting (including PHP, which I had barely touched before) which will benefit my overall approach to things.
The no part of yes and no is that I've put out a lot of energy in a small space. Perhaps I should be writing books a la Cluetrain Manifesto, or even books of broader utility. Still, I do what I can do well, and this was a good deal all around. My co-author, Jeff, is a fine writer and collaborator, and the book is something I'm very proud about. Occasionally, readers email us and tell us how our book did change their life -- a new job, a raise, a better Web site -- and that's truly what it's all about. It's a living, but at the end of the day, you want to make sure you did something to help people, not just produce prose.
Posted by Glennf at April 20, 2002 8:25 PM
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You said "Do I want to spend so much intellectual energy on a single software product?" Can anything meaning full be accomplished with out spending a lot of energy in a single area? I don't think so. If you got feedback from people saying you helped them, it probably means you helped a lot of people who will never say anything to you. Actually doing something that helps people is worth a lot.
On the other had I have no use for GoLive. How about spending your time on something that is useful to me? :-)
Posted by: mattj at April 21, 2002 8:09 AM
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