This year my income as a writer almost matched my consulting income. Although neither are appreciable sums, it represents a distinct shift in my non-dayjob efforts of which I am both proud, and deeply interested in developing further.
Learning Puppet 4 covering Puppet 4.4 is now available
Learning Puppet 4: A Guide to Configuration Management and Automation
The final, professionally edited book is now available for online reading at Safari Books
Offline versions can be found at:
- O’Reilly Media Print, PDF, and ePub
- Amazon Print or Kindle
BringGo Review: right idea, worst possible implementation
I’ve been driving an EV car all week. Fun! Now I don’t tend think much of stock car stereos. Often when I bought a new car, replacing the stock radio was something I did on the way home before the car even got to my house. But I was, frankly, blown away with how good the stereo in the Chevy Spark EV was. HD FM radio? Check. Tightly integrated Sirius radio? Check. Bluetooth audio streaming? Check. Best display for interacting with my iPod I’ve ever seen. How, like, I would keep this!
When Chevy told me that the navigation system in the car worked with an app on my phone, I was very excited. “Someone finally got the right idea!” No more horrible built in Navigation. No more multi-hundred dollar map updates. I was so happy, I had such high hopes. I immediately downloaded the BringGo application and… Read More
Learning Puppet 4 Early Release is now available
Learning Puppet 4: A Guide to Configuration Management and Automation
This book teaches you how to use Puppet 4 for configuration management and automation. If you are an experienced DevOps engineer, this book covers in detail the changes and improvements in Puppet 4 and how to make best use of them.
Write books in the HTMLBook standard using Scrivener
My favorite writing tool is Scrivener. I wrote the Learning MCollective book for O’Reilly Media entirely in Scrivener, exporting to AsciiDoc. I was afraid this wouldn’t work very well, but it ended up working just great. You can get my export settings and processing scripts from https://github.com/jorhett/scrivener-asciidoc.
O’Reilly Media promotes and utilizes a lot of web standards. They have switched over to using HTMLBook for new projects. HTMLBook is an XHTML5-based standard for the authoring and production of both print and digital books.
To support this in my upcoming book, I created a Scrivener compile format which outputs chapter headings in HTMLBook. Then I wrote some scripts to process the output from Scrivener compile to make valid HTMLBook, cut into parts and adjusted for the expectations of O’Reilly Atlas.
I have released my Scrivener compile settings and scripts so that others can use them. They are open source under an Apache license at https://github.com/jorhett/scrivener-htmlbook.