Archive for December, 2001

Design Your Own O’Reilly Book Cover

I’m hooked on DocBook.

Docbook is a form of XML meant for writing documents. You

write up your document using XML tags: Here’s the title of my

document, here’s part one, here’s part two, here’s a footnote.

Then you use an XML transformation tool to take your Docbook

XML file and transform it into a nice readable format like HTML,

PDF, or RTF. Or all three. The conversion tools do the grunt

work for you, setting up footnotes and internal links, creating

a table of contents, and all the other mundane tasks that make

creating and maintaining documentation such a chore.

This is particularly nice for something like your

resume, which, if you’re like me, you

begrudgingly maintain multiple versions of. With

Docbook, you only have to maintain one file. Then you

convert it to whatever formats you want for publication.

Today I found myself frustrated by the .asx playlists used at

Nugs.net. They’re meant for

Windows media player and as far as I can tell unsupported by

any of the linux mp3 players. Fortunately, .asx is an

href='http://www.xml.com'>XML-based

format (thanks, Microsoft). So I wrote up a little

xslt stylesheet that pulls out the URLs from an .asx

file and ouputs a valid m3u-formatted playlist. It’s available

here.

This has

got to be one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen my computer do.

Joel Spolsky’s company

Fog Creek Software just

released a new website content management system called

CityDesk.

There’s a free single-user version that let’s you create and edit a

website up to 50 pages. I took it for a spin at lunch today, using

a Windows computer at work.

The fruits of my labors can be seen here.