Publishing

Leanpub is a platform for publishing books that gives author control and tools beyond those available from traditional publishers. I used it to test an idea for a Solr Clients book and was able to validate its lack of traction without spending a cent.

One of the great features of Leanpub is that a book can be updated and the readers get notified of the new version. Consequently, it is sometime useful to keep the old versions around for the author and sometimes even for the readers.

This feature is not currently present in Leanpub, but we can add that with a bit of a glue from Zapier - web automation service. This is especially useful if you are using GitHub to edit your book with automatic preview and want a full end-to-end edit-preview experience without having to touch the Leanpub website.

It’s been 9 months since my introductory Solr book came out. It was written for version 4.3. In the meanwhile, Solr kept marching on and is now at version 4.7. There has been quite a number of changes and new features. So I really wanted to recheck that the examples in the book still make sense.  I also wanted to do the tests on Windows to see whether the *nix-centered instructions in the book caused any issues.

This first part covers the issues and supplementary material based on the review of the first five chapters. Later parts will be covered in other blog posts. So far, it seems that the examples survived without any serious issues.

It is a great moment. After many months of work, my book is finally published and is available from multiple sources. It is called Instant Apache Solr for Indexing Data How-to and it has been published by the Packt Publishing.

There is a number of books published on Solr, but I feel that mine is different. Most of the books try to cover as much of Solr as possible and have a reference-style approach to explaining what different Solr components do. This is useful but - because Solr is so large - it is easy to get over-saturated with all the information and still have no idea of how to put a good Solr setup together.

I knew I was neglecting my blog in 2012, but I did not realize just how much until I received WordPress’ year in review for 2012 (Feel free to take a peek at it). The line that stopped me dead was “In 2012, there was 1 new post”. Sure enough - one post it was.

Well, this blog might be comatose, but I am not dead. In fact, quite the opposite, so busy that there is very little time for crafting articles.

Two books, two views - no agreement, but certainly a lot of sparks. Is the Internet full of junk and by killing off the conventional media we are loosing all our good information sources? That is a point of view of Andrew Keen, author of the book Cult of the Amateur. On the other hand Weinberger, with his own book Everything is Miscellaneous, agrees that there is a lot of bad stuff on the Internet, but argues that there is a lot of good stuff too.