Keith’s Blog

As of today, 30 O’Reilly titles are available as Ebook bundles and many will be in the Kindle Store later today:
As promised last month, O’Reilly has released 30 titles as DRM-free downloadable ebook bundles. The bundles include three ebook formats (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) for a single price — at or below the book’s [...]

Keith Fahlgren at his TOC Tutorial, XML for Publishers

Originally uploaded by duncandavidson

I just got back from New York and the second annual O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) Conference. It’s become a very impressive conference in just two years and had impressive attendance and [...]

Norm Walsh writes:
Stylesheets can have literally hundreds of parameters. The DocBook XSL Stylesheets have more than six hundred.
All I can say at this point is: wow. Grepping the core of our own customization shows 121 <xsl:param>s (about 20 of which we introduced) and 52 <xsl:attribute-set>s (20, again). Thinking about it now (as I haven’t before), [...]

James Snell has been working some interesting things as the work on the Atom Publishing Protocol spec winds down. Most recently, he posted some thoughts on how to effectively communicate partial updates to APP servers using HTTP PATCH.
[UPDATE: James points out the obvious drawback to this approach in his response.]
One of the things that [...]

[UPDATE: Added a link to the categorized CSV file below]
Here’s some of the nitty-gritty behind DocBook Elements in the Wild. We’re trying to get a count of all of the element names in a set of 49 DocBook 4.4 <book>s.
First, go ask the O’Reilly product database for all the books that were sent to the [...]

Well, I finally caught up with the crowd and got JRuby running on one of my dev boxes. The reason I’d been interested in it from the getgo was because Ruby lacks any support for internal XSLT processing. All those system()s were starting to get me down, especially as I’m trying to get a DocBook->PDF [...]

[Read this for an introduction to what I'm talking about].
Now that we’ve got our FrameMaker documents in XML, how can we exploit their new format? One of the first things I did was to create new ways of reading (eventually changing) the simple data stored within them. This isn’t all that earth-shattering, but when you [...]

I gave a short talk at the first North Bay Ruby Users Group last Thursday (Feb 15, 2007) about my recent work implementing an Atom Publishing Protocol library in Ruby. Here’s the presentation:

[Read this for an introduction to what I'm talking about].
The first step of doing anything useful with MX is the ability to get back out into MIF. Thankfully, this is an entirely trivial job in XSLT.
[This code thanks to my boss, Andrew Savikas.]

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<xsl:stylesheet version=”1.0″
xmlns:xsl=”http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform”>
<!– author: Andrew Savikas, O’Reilly Media –>

[...]

My O’Reilly colleague Andy Bruno has just written a pair of posts on converting FrameMaker’s MIF (link may be old/die) format into XML (henceforth ‘MX’). I’ll be writing a few posts outlining the ways in which we’ve leveraged MX at O’Reilly.
[Update: Series continues here with getting back into MIF, and reading bookfiles.]