Hey MT fans, watch out for WP:

i went from blogger to movabletype to wordpress and i’m digging it very much. i’m half of the dawn and drew podcast and wasn’t sure if you know about podcasting or not, but all of adam curry’s podshow affiliates are using wordpress across the network. i’m in the process of redoing adam’s site in wordpress now.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

What they are saying:

Tim Bray: It’s cooked and ready to serve.

Jon Udell: What I like most about Atom is its careful delineation of the kinds of content that can be included in a feed, including: plain text, HTML, XHTML, XML, and externally-referenced resources.

Anne van Kesteren: Atom has the following namespace: http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom. I know, the capital sucks, but it is a copy and paste thing anyway.

James M Snell: Some are under the false impression that Atom requires that all extensions must be passed through the IETF ratification process. This is absolutely incorrect. Atom 1.0 can be extended in exactly the same manner as RSS 2.0.

RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 compared: The RSS 2.0 specification is copyrighted by Harvard University and is frozen. No significant changes can be made and it is intended that future work be done under a different name; Atom is one example of such work.

Rogers Cadenhead: And I for one welcome our new syndication overlords.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Good question. I think it helps to understand what a producer does in terms of the path an article takes from inception to publication.

1. Author writes an article
2. Author sends the article to his/her editor
3. Editor edits article, making sure it adheres to basic XHTML standards (e.g. paragraphs are wrapped in <p></p> tags, etc.)
4. Editor enters article into our content management system, filling in appropriate metadata fields, leaving a note that it’s ready for production
5. Editor sends producer any article assets (graphics, audio, code samples)
6. Producer checks article out of the content management system to process it in Dreamweaver
   • makes sure headers start with <h3>
   • makes sure code blocks are wrapped in <pre><code></code></pre>
   • replaces ” (quotes) in text with "
   • makes sure article validates as XHTML transitional
   • adds content management system specific header, footer, and page breaks
   • adds sidebar that points to a related book
   • checks links
7. Producer processes article assets
   • resizes images if wider than 500px, taller than 450px, creating thumbnails/popups in special cases
   • uploads images into correct location on webserver
   • fills in the <img> src, width, height, and alt attributes
   • formats captions appropriately, wrapped in <em></em> tags below the photo
8. Producer checks article back into the content management system, making sure it’s displaying properly, leaving a note that it’s ready to be copyedited
9. Copyeditor checks article out of the content management system, copyedits article, checks article back in, leaving a note that copyediting is done
10. Producer tells the content management system to publish article, which creates a static version of the file in a permanent location
11. Producer uses the content management system to update various site index pages that link to the article

On average it seems to take about 30 minutes to get an article ready for copyediting, longer if there are multiple images. Publishing the article after copyediting takes about 5-10 minutes. Each of our sites has a responsible producer, as well as a publication schedule of 1-3 articles per week.

So at most I’ll be producing 2-3 articles a day, sometimes only one. When I’m not doing article production I’m working on other top sekret projectz.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Here are two O’Reilly titles you might not have heard of. Both are part of the Theory in Practice series, which for some reason doesn’t have its own series page off the oreilly.com domain (as far as I can tell). Seems like they’d have been perfect texts for some of my information science classes. I do love the animal books, but based on their covers alone, I want to pick them both up on the way home.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Clever typography in an ad I just noticed on one of our websites.

(remixed from the original banner format so it would all fit here)

Given the ubiquity of http://, it’s funny to see it popping up in other domains. Funnier even that Tim Berners-Lee, who invented all that stuff, regrets the decision to use :// to separate the protocol from the hostname in the original URL specification.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.