I don’t know where or how you can still order this, but you could probably just drop Doug a line. I won’t release the poor boys e-mails to the wolves here, but I’ll set you up with it if you message (massage) me. Happy New Year.

After week(s) of research and nearly as much real time hacking together a conversion, Didn’t Die Young Yet by Jacob Cholak is available for $3 on Amazon as an eBook.

eBook formatting is much more akin to website development than anything approaching or resembling design. I happen to know quite a bit about web development, and I was also horrified to see what any of the “pdf to ePub” or even “html to ePub” converters did to my beautiful little book, so I had to start from just about scratch and format that damn thing properly by hand. This involved a lot of mindless and blinding precision copy and pasting, liberal use of search and replace and the delete button. I had to write a number of scripts (shell and javascript) to expedite the tedium. I will probably write some set of tools that will make the translation of our other book, White Horses much smoother.

The interesting thing I found in my research into eBooks is that no-one really cares about them yet. The designers haven’t latched onto them because they’re still a fairly “ugly” format that lacks most of the control you get with the much more standardized and documented web. And on the other side, the programmers haven’t jumped in to flesh out those controls and standards, because it’s still books, which everyone knows is for the grandparents of extinct dinosaurs. This means that the whole format is in an exciting state where it’s still unpolished and developing. Commercially the medium is growing by leaps and bounds (we’ve all seen the charts), but, strangely for the internet, the technology is lagging behind just a touch. This is exciting news for someone both obsessed with books and internet technology. A fertile but unplowed ground to combine two fetishes.

So the (e)Book is up and there’s another one coming. Also if you’re a sucker for paper, the real thing is still on sale too: Didn’t Die Young Yet and NaDA has the fundraiser going on for the rest of the month. Please support our thankless labors.

I am moving in both place and mind. I have been working as a web designer/ developer for a number of years. Largely it has been satisfying and educational work. There is much intrigue to me in understanding these technologies we inhabit. It is wonderful work to enable and empower individual humans and projects, less so to dress up faceless business and spin one’s wheels. In moving place I am raising money. In moving mind I am raising awareness and quality. Templates are well and good where personality lacks. Templates are an insult to personality. Many friends with websites are left with no place to turn but to the vile template overlords. Who can afford a website?

For swaggeringly deflated rates I will design/redesign/and/or/redevelop the websites of humans. The projects will be addressed as they come in, and I will take every measure possible to turn them around in no more than a week’s time. All the sites will be collected and linked on a communal site at the end of the project so that friends may share friends and websites alike.

I am a designer, programmer, and tinkerer. Here is the evidence:

alt/ATL Delete (professionally)
OR/AND

ATL/alt Website (casually)

Send me adjectives, designs you like, and what you’re looking for in a home on the internet. Please no: “I’d like to develop like a Facebook type application for my readers.” or “Can you make like, YouTube?” No more social networks. Let’s talk about you.
All sites built from scratch to spec. Quick, clean, and compliant code that’ll grow old slow and well.

Blogger and WordPress friendly. If there’s a question about features/functionality, e-mail first and we’ll discuss it. These should be quick projects, not big builds.

Kickstarter Project Link: Friends With Websites

Pre-Order White Horses. I should also mention that it is the author’s (pictured above) birthday today.

Sources-ish:
Google
Publishers Weekly
Books Ahead

A 5 minute proof of concept (actually spent longer putting the damn thing up on the site). A bastardization of PHP Javascript, CSS, and rand(). Available in full screen versions. Very variable. Not the fastest on the draw but… faster now that I re-wrote it in Javascript. I like writing PHP so much more, so generally I end up rewriting programs again and again because it’s not necessarily the best (actually explicitly NOT) way to hand in-browser processing. Pixel Junk