Gadgetopia

Welcome to Packt Publishing: This is a new IT book publisher. "Packt is a new publishing company for IT professionals. We publish books that provide solutions to real problems. People rely on you for solutions." Before you write this off as cheesy marketing copy, take a look at the titles ...

Open Source Receives Royalties Boost: This is an awfully cool thing. Most of Packt's books are on open-source stuff, and a lot of them are on projects for which no other books have been written. Good to see them support the projects which provide them with subjects for their books. ...

2007 Open Source CMS Award: Packt has started up their 2007 awards for open-source content management, and yours truly has been selected as a judge in the Best Social Networking CMS category. What s cool is that Bryan over at CMS Report got selected as a judge too, which means humble ...

Open Source CMS Award: Packt is doing their awards again this year, and I ve been asked to judge in Best Open Source PHP CMS. Go nominate your favorite app. Nominations are open through August 25. Now entering its third year, the Award has established itself as an important measure for ...

Packt Book Store :: Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management: We've talked about Packt Publishing before, but now it looks like they're really hitting high gear. Here's a book about PHPMyAdmin, which I never thought we'd see but which is badly needed. You may think you know PHPMyAdmin, but if ...

Bribing Bloggers: This is a really interesting post from Spolsky about the ethics of bloggers accepting free stuff from vendors. Apparently Microsoft offered to send Joel a new Ferrari laptop pre-loaded with Vista, for free. [...] I've decided that from this point forward I'm not accepting anything, full stop. Even ...

Writing For Packt: Packt Publishing has done a nice job here of shedding some light on how much you'd make if you wrote the ultimate tech book that I just know you've been contemplating. This focused business model translates into higher royalty rates for you as an author: 15% of ...

I was in Barnes and Noble tonight, and I noticed a few things. There were four books on the shelves having to do with Mambo and/or Joomla (I refuse to add the exclamation point). This is the first time I've seen books on those systems in my local store. I ...

WordPress Wins Best Open Source Social Networking CMS: I was a judge on this panel. Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress ...

If any of you have been dying to hear my voice, you finally have a chance. I recently did a screencast for Packt Publishing on eZ publish, the snazzy open-source content management system. It's a five-minute Flash movie that demonstrates how good eZ publish is at modeling Web content. You ...

Drupal Wins Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award: Drupal wins it all. After three intense months of voting, Packt Publishing can today announce that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt’s website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, ...

Do-it-yourself book publishing takes off on the Web: Good article about the phenomenon of on-demand book printing, which is the Next Big Thing in book publishing. We've talked this before, both with the Internet Bookmobile, and with Packt Publishing, who prints all their books on-demand. Instead, the Seattle residents ...

Smarty PHP Template Programming and Applications: Packt is publishing a book about Smarty. Great news -- Smarty is such a great library that it's about time it's handled in a book of its own (it's so great, in fact, that it's almost it's own language...) This book is a comprehensive ...

I'm reading Packt's new book on SpamAssassin, and it's shaping up to be a good one. More on the entire book later, but I found some interesting tidbits on the history of spam in the first few pages. The first spam ever sent was on May 3, 1978 from a ...

I have something of a small ethical dilemma. Let me explain I have been selected as a judge in Packt s Open Source CMS Awards. In this capacity, I m being asked to rate whatever CMS are nominated. I m fairly sure Joomla will be one of the nominees, along with Drupal, ...

I was in Boston on business a couple of weeks ago, and one of the things I did for fun was take the train to Cambridge and walk around the campus of Harvard University. Call me a total dork, but it was amazing to actually be there. (Did you know ...

phpMyAdmin is usually installed quickly, out of acute necessity. You need to do something with your database, and you can't do it via telnet or SSH or anything else, so you download the latest version, FTP it up, and away you go. More often than not, the install is forgotten ...