Mike Little’s Journalized

I would like to wish you all a “merry Christmas”, “happy Hanukkah”, “happy Kwanzaa”, or just plain old “seasons greetings” whatever you may celebrate at this time of year.

I wish you all the best.

Wow! It’s hard to believe, but my first book is now a reality! Several copies of my first book — “Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress” arrived at my door this morning.

This is the book, published by Apress that I have co-authored with Robert T Douglass and Jared Smith over the last six months or so. It has long been my ambition to be published and when the opportunity presented itself earlier this year, I had to grab it with both hands. It has been quite a hard struggle; writing in a small amount of spare time is not easy, but I do think it has been worth it.

The result is six chapters on using WordPress to help build an online community. Although I wrote the book using version 1.5.x most of the WordPress chapters are version agnostic. This isn’t a “how to use WordPress” book (the excellent WordPress Codex is good for that). This is a book about how to use WordPress to help you build an online community.

You can buy the book online directly from Apress including in eBook form. You can buy from Amazon.co.uk or you can buy it from Amazon.com. I’m not sure whether it will be on the shelves of your local book store yet, but it will be over the next couple of days.

Apress have a good summary of the book (my emphasis):

Content management, blogs, and online forums are among the most significant online trends today, and Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress are three of the most popular open source applications facilitating these trends.

Drupal is a full content management system that allows you to create any type of website you desire, from an e-commerce to a community-based site. phpBB enables you to set up a bulletin board or forum. And WordPress is the software of choice for the exploding blog community. All three technologies are based on PHP and MySQL.

Finally, I think Jamie is quite proud of her Dad, Jan is just glad it’s finally published! I must thank them both for putting up with me while I’ve struggled through this. The next one will be easier! I have to thank Matt, Ryan, and the rest of the WordPress community, without whom I would have had nothing to write about!

Kraig Garland tragically passed away 8th December 2005 aged just 29 years. Today is his funeral. It is a sad day for all his friends and family.

There is an online Book of Condolence set up for family and friends.

I’m looking forward to the WordPress meet-up in London tomorrow. Matt Mullenweg will be visiting the UK (for the first time?) on Friday. I’m quite excited to be meeting Matt and Podz amongst others.

There has been a conversation over at Podz’ blog about arrangements and timings.

The arrangements so far are a bit sketchy but the most concrete seems to be a meeting in Starbucks, Long Acre in Covent Garden. Though Matt is not yet confirmed to be at that one.

Here is Starbucks’ own map of the store complete with confirmation of wireless internet access!

The likelihood is that there will be another get-together in the evening. I’ll be in London from just after noon till late evening.