Announcements and Press Releases

I've just committed to my next writing project -- a how-to for the new Ubuntu Desktop. The book will be part of Wiley's Visual Blueprint series (the same series I worked on for the Mambo book a couple of years ago.)

The working title is Ubuntu Linux : Your Visual Blueprint to the Linux Operating System. The text targets the new 8.10 series desktop (aka "Intrepid Ibex"), which is now in beta and is slated for final release at the end of October. The publication date of the book has yet to be finalized, but it should be out early '09.

I'm looking forward to this one -- we run Ubuntu servers in our office and we have a couple of desktops running the Hardy Heron release (8.04). This will be a good chance to become more fluent in what looks set to be the dominant flavor of the linux desktop.

Today is the official release of my newest book - Drupal 6 Themes. Here is the press release from my publisher, Packt Publishing:

Packt is pleased to announce a new book that teaches users to create and modify themes for Drupal websites. Written by prominent Open Source and Content Management expert Ric Shreves, Drupal 6 Themes helps users create a striking new look for their Drupal websites with clean layout and powerful CSS styling.

We released today the first extensive report on market share in the open source CMS market. The report covers 19 of the most popular systems and measures them on a variety of traditional and Web 2.0 metrics.

We found some interesting things, but the key conclusion (for most people) is our determination that the market is dominated by just three names: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal. The report also indentifies projects that may be in trouble and new names to watch.

At 50 pages, there is a significant amount of data that should be of use to developers or to anyone who is looking to commit to a web publishing system.

Visit the water&stone site to download a free copy: http://www.waterandstone.com/resources.html

~ making twitter a useful communications channel ~

I started a little experiment last week and it seems to be getting traction. The idea was to see if there was some way to extract more value from Twitter. Like a lot of my friends, I found Twitter to be less than useful -- jammed up with announcements about mundane habits and trivia which really was just a waste of time. Micro-blogging wasn't living up to its potential. The question became: How to get some quality content out of this medium?