One of my biggest pet peeves is the misuse of the word “blog” when referring to a single post on a weblog. I was just reading A Rendezvous With Microsoft’s Deep Throat (how could you not with a title like that?) and noticed at the end of the article a header that read “For some of Mini’s most popular blogs, check out:” followed by a list of popular posts.

Unfortunately this misuse exists here at O’Reilly, as we have bloggers who submit their posts into one big system (weblogs.oreilly.com) without any sort of individual blog identity or blog name. Since the traditional notion of a blog (definition: a collection of posts composed by a single person [or cabal], ordered in reverse chronological order) doesn’t really exist, people’s posts are referred to as “weblogs” (e.g. Todd Ogasawara’s author page) which can be filtered by author or topic.

As we continue to develop and improve the O’Reilly Network, my hope is that we can organize our bloggers around subject oriented group blogs—and start referring to posts as posts.

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

Uh-oh, looks like we have some work to do:

Next… for some odd reason, I’m feeling more and more MSFT-Patriotic as of late. One thorn I’m really beginning to get tired of, strangely enough, is O’Reilly media. Ever since I was a long-haired Unix geek I relied on O’Reilly. But I’m just getting tired of their begrudging support of Microsoft while at the same time snarking at us from their blogs and conventions. Annoyed with us? Then do us a favor and don’t go publishing anymore Microsoft-centric titles and make money elsewhere. As soon as I can find a reliable publisher that does as good a job of editing and producing texts, I’m switching. I really regret ever dollar now I spend towards buying an O’Reilly book when there’s not a quality alternative. —Mini-Microsoft

All I have to add is it’s not necessarily a requirement to love something in order to support it. That would be preferable, but it’s not always an option.

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.

Yeah, poking fun at potential customers or authors is probably not so cool if you’re a for-profit publishing company. Oops. That said, if you’re interested in writing for O’Reilly definitely take a look at the link below. –Justin

Check out this very detailed webpage set up for authors called So You Want to Write a Book? There are seven chapters.

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

Nigel McFarlane, author of O’Reilly’s Firefox Hacks as well as Rapid Application Development with Mozilla (both books I owned before coming to work for O’Reilly), has passed away. I don’t know the details, and found out about it first via Ben Goodger’s blog.

A quick search for “nigel mcfarlane” on Feedster turned up more details, saying not much more than he passed away suddenly and was a passionate evangelist of the open source and Mozilla community.

I saw him give a presentation last August at the Mozilla Developer Day conference, and I’ve heard people remark that before Firefox became mainstream, Nigel was the sole person out there writing articles on Mozilla development and technology.

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