Happy with some changes I made to chapter 2 and have given that to Carla to review. She’s also got chapter 1, but is slacking and hasn’t read it yet. She’s the biggest bookworm I know and I’m expecting lots of useful feedback from her, so hurry up Carla!

Thinking of cutting the current chapter 3, doesn’t seem to fit. Nothing wasted, though. Plenty of detail I can work into other chapters, and writing it helped me to think about things.

In other news, I’m pleased at the developments in digital reading since the last time I worked on a book about five years ago. That book was getting pretty wacky, and over time, I realised I didn’t have much chance of getting it published the traditional way. I started thinking about E-Books, which back then were basically PDFs, but never did anything with it.

E-Books today are much more interesting. I’ve never used a Kindle, but it looks pretty cool, and supposedly there’s a larger version being announced today for use with newspapers and textbooks, etc. After reading about Amazon’s purchase of Stanza, an iPhone / iPod touch E-Book reader, I checked it out on my touch and was very impressed. Crisp text, nice interface. Can definitely see myself reading a book on that.

(As an experiment last year, I read one of Terry Goodkind’s jumbo Sword of Truth books – Chainfire, I believe – on my BlackBerry Curve. Small screen, but it was surprisingly enjoyable. The portability was very appealing. I always had my phone with me and could whip out a book for a quick read whenever I wanted. Great on the Tube, not so good for longer sessions lying in bed!)

My intention is that the current book be published traditionally, in print, in bookstores. An E-Book version would come as well, but the goal is holding that big lump of paper!

I had meant to keep reworking ch1-4 until I had something I felt I could start showing to others, but the urge to actually do some writing was stronger than the desire for feedback. (I also probably need to buy a printer before I get into serious, this-can-now-be-shown-to-others editing, and I can’t really afford one right now :P )

The other option was to to grab the update straight from my Identica RSS feed using an RSS plugin like Simply RSS Fetcher. The problem here was that the Identi.ca RSS feed sticks a “marcfiszman:” before each update, which I didn’t want.

Enter the wonderful Yahoo Pipes, a “powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web”. I ran the Identi.ca feed through a pipe which limits the RSS output to a single item and strips the “marcfiszman:” reference.

• Old feed: http://identi.ca/marcfiszman/rss
• New feed: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=IKgdFqEj3hGccwcD0z6skA&_render=rss

And because pipes are pretty, here’s a picture of mine:

The Pipes interface is very intuitive and a lot of fun. Go try it out if you haven’t already!