Category: books

I’ve just seen that on Live Journal there’s a community called 50bookchallenge. The idea is to try to read 50 books in 2004. Weird to think that there are people who would find reading 50 books in a year to be a challenge.

When I was first playing with HTML many years ago, one of the first web sites that I built was one that gently took the piss out of Barbara Cartland. I haven’t done anything with it for years. In fact I was mildly surprised to find it there when I moved all my sites to… Continue reading Barbara Cartland

The nice man from DHL has just delivered a box containing many copies of the Badger book. This is one of my favourite parts of the book-writing process.

A day and a half into NaNoWriMo and I’m already a few thousand words behind schedule. The weekends are supposed to be a chance to get ahead of schedule so that you can slack off a bit during the week. Hey ho. If you’re interested, my feeble efforts are online.

Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards is essential reading for any web designer.

A few days ago I signed up for NaNoWriMo (that’s National Novel Writing Month in English). The idea is that during the month of November you produce a 50,000 word novel. I’ve been meaning to have a go at writing fiction for a while now. I’m planning to flesh out an idea that I first… Continue reading Writing Novels

My new book Perl Template Toolkit[1] recently appeared on O’Reilly’s web site. This is one of my favourite parts of the publication process as it proves to the outside world that the book is real. The other parts I really like are when I first get my hands on a copy of the book and… Continue reading New Book

On the way to the london.pm technical meeting last Thursday I stopped into Forbidden Planet and picked up some comics. The most important purchase was probably a copy of Neil Gaiman’s new Sandman[1] book Endless Nights. I also picked up copies of Gaiman’s 1602 and Joss Whedon’s Fray. Unfortunately because I don’t visit comic shops… Continue reading Missing Comics

Bizarre clash of concepts. A much loved set of books from my childhood and my current publishers. Exploring Narnia

So I finally got round to finishing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It’s taken me about a month to read it – not because it was so long, but because it was so dull. I kept having to go off and read other stuff inbetween chapters to stop myself from falling asleep.… Continue reading Order of the Phoenix