Blogging Roller

Status is: almost complete. I'm wrapping up the last of the new writing and getting ready to revise the chapter on feed parsing to include some things I learned writing the blog apps. We're still waiting on Atom Protocol. Competing books have already gone to print without Atom Protocol, so that will be a good differentiator for us. We've also decided to make some last minute changes in the book. I'll sum them up for you.

First, the biggest change: the title. We found that "Blogs, Wikis and Feeds" is a little confusing and leads folks to believe that the book is about using blogs, wikis and feeds when in reality the book is about developing applications using RSS, Atom and other blog technologies. The leading candidate for the new title is "RSS and Atom in Action" subtitled "building applications with blog technologies."

Next, some chopping. We're going to cut two chapters: the log to your blog with Log4X chapter, which was to show how to use Java/Log4J and/or C#/Log4N to log to a blog, and the BlogClient chapter which was going to show how to build a simple BlogClient GUI with C# and/or Java. I'm happy with this decision becuase the Log4X chapter just wasn't compelling, plus it's dead-simple to implement. And, the BlogClient chapter wasn't that interesting either, considering that there are already plenty of blog clients out there (and I've already posted the code for mine).

And finally, the bookends: new chapters at the beginning and end of the book. We're introducing a Chapter Zero to lead folks into the book, introduce the pre-requisites and the organization of the book. A new end-chapter will cover all of the cool ideas and applications that we couldn't fit in as complete blog apps.