My very own podcast

Excited to announce my very own podcast on podcasting. I’ve finally taken my own advice and started a podcast about my passion – Podcasting Advisor. This will fit in well with the book. If you go to the website there’s a voiceline to leave questions or you can just email me and I’ll answer them on the shows.
From now on any posts on this blog will be strictly to do with the book only. I’ll write general podcasting issues posts on the podcast’s site.
Meanwhile I’ve just uploaded draft 5 of the book. It’s a lot prettier now that I’ve moved away from LaTeX and onto Pages on the Mac. It’s not that I have anything against LaTeX, but I just find it more productive and inspiring to write in a WYSIWYG tool that allows you to embed pictures so nicely. The proof reading functionality is pretty cool too. The only thing I miss is automated index creation – blast!

The book has images

I’ve been creating line drawings today and inserting them into the book. I did the drawings in my notebook (thats a paper notebook) then took photos of them right next to the window for natural light. A quick edit in iPhoto – crop, saturation to zero to take away colour, then boost exposure to max. The result was quite good with the background ending up pure white.

I continue to be impressed with LaTeX which did a grand job of floating them in the text at the specified scale. Nice. It’s amazing how images bring a book to life and how they can convey complex ideas in a simple way. It’ll be interesting to see how the group feeds back on them.

Word count so far: approx. 6,300.

Draft Version 2 Released

Have just released Draft 2 to the group for comments. Looking forward to some more feedback – it can be a lonely place – book writing.

For those who are interested, I’m using LaTeX to author the book. This is my first foray into this, frankly amazing, tool. In essence, you write a source file in plain text, then run it through LaTeX which converts it into a beautiful PDF document. At least that’s the idea – I’m still getting to grips with some of it. The thing I love about LaTeX is that, like programing code, you can place internal comments into the manuscript to remind yourself of things you intend to do later or might forget. LaTeX does other cool stuff like automatically build a table of contents, indexes and bibliographies – and I’ve only scratched the surface. Can’t wait to learn more…