Thoughts From Eric Archive

At least two of our three kids had a hard time being put to sleep at night.  It wasn’t so much that they objected to sleeping — once they were out, they stayed out all night — as they got very anxious about being left alone.  I’m not talking about one-week-olds here; I’m talking more the 3-9 month range.  We’d cuddle them to sleep, put them down very gently, cautiously trace a silent path along the non-creaking floorboards, noiselessly pull the door shut…and then the wailing would start.

But then we noticed that when we went back in to pick them and soothe them, they would take a great big indrawn breath, hold it, release, and settle down.  We wondered: could they be relaxing because they smelled us, and that scent was triggering feelings of comfort and safety?

From then on, we would put the little one down to sleep, take off our shirt, and arrange the shirt in a wide horseshoe around the head and upper body of the sleeping baby, at least a foot separated on every side to avoid smothering risks.  And…it worked.  There was a lot more sleeping and a lot less waking up wailing.  The scent seemed to give them what they needed to stay relaxed and asleep.

It probably won’t work for every child who has trouble sleeping, but if you’re having the same problem we did, try (safely!) surrounding them your shirt or some other article of clothing that smells like you.  It might be just what they need to settle down and let you get some rest.

• The Scent of a Parent was published on Thursday, October 4th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the Hacks and Parenting categories.
• There have been four replies.

When I announced the serial publication of CSS: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition, I failed to address the question how pricing will work.  Well, more decided to break it out into its own post, really.  As it turns out, there are two components to the answer.

First component is the pricing of the pre-books.  Roughly speaking, each pre-book will be priced according to its length.  The assumed base for the electronic version is $2.99, and $7.99 for the print version, with significantly longer pre-books (say, one where two chapters are combined) priced somewhat higher.  How much higher depends on the length.  It’s possible that prices will drift a bit over time as production or printing costs change, but there’s no way to guarantee that.  We’re basically pricing them as they come out.

At the end of the process, when all the chapters are written and bundled into an omnibus book edition, there will be discounts tied to the chapters you’ve already purchased.  The more chapters you bought ahead, the deeper the discount.  If you bought the pre-books direct from O’Reilly, then you’ll automatically get a discount code tailored to the number of pre-book you’ve already bought.  If you bought them elsewhere, then O’Reilly’s customer service will work to create a comparable discount, though that will obviously be a slower process.

The second component is: how much will the codes cut the price of the final, complete book?  That I cannot say.  The reason is that I don’t know (nor does anyone) what minimum price O’Reilly will need to charge to cover its costs while taking into account the money already paid.  I’m hopeful that if you bought all of the pre-books, then the electronic version of the final book will be very close to free, but again, we have to see where things stand once we reach that point.  It might be that the production costs of the complete book mean that it’s still a couple of bucks even at the deepest discount, but we’ll see!  One of the exciting things about this experiment is that even my editor and I don’t know exactly how it will all turn out.  We really are forging a new trail here, one that I hope will benefit other authors — and, by direct extension, readers — in the future.

• Pricing ‘CSS:The Definitive Guide’ was published on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Projects, Standards, and Writing categories.
• There have been three replies.

I’m really excited to announce that CSS: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition, is being released one piece at a time.

As announced last week on the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing blog, the next edition of CSS:TDG will be released chapter by chapter.  As each one is finished, it will go into production right away instead of waiting for the entire omnibus book to be completed.  You’ll be able to get each standalone as an e-book, a print-on-demand paper copy, or even as both if that’s how you roll.  I’ve taken to calling these “pre-books”, which I hope isn’t too confusing or inaccurate.

There are a lot of advantages to this, which I wrote about in some detail for the TOC post.  Boiled down, they are: accuracy, agility, and à la carte.  If you have the e-book version, then updates can be downloaded for free as errata are corrected or rewrites are triggered by changes to CSS itself.  And, of course, you can only buy the pre-books that interest you, if you don’t feel like you need the whole thing.

I should clarify that not every pre-book is a single chapter; occasionally, more than one chapter of the final product will be bundled together into a single pre-book.  For example, Selectors, Specificity, and the Cascade is actually chapters 2 and 3 of the final book combined.  It just made no sense to sell them separately, so we didn’t.  “Values, Units, and Colors”. on the other hand, is Chapter 4 all by itself.  (So if anyone was wondering about the pricing differences between those two pre-books, there’s your explanation.)

If you want to see what the e-book versions are like, CSS and Documents (otherwise known as Chapter 1) has been given the low, low price of $0.00.  Give it a whirl, see if you like the way the pre-books work as bits.

My current plan is to work through the chapters sequentially, but I’m always willing to depart from that plan if it seems like a good idea.  What amuses me about all this is the way the writing of CSS: The Definitive Guide has come to mirror CSS itself — split up into modules that can be tackled independently of the others, and eventually collected into a snapshot tome that reflects a point in time instead of an overarching version number.

Every pre-book is a significantly updated version of their third-edition counterparts, though of course a great deal of material has stayed the same.  In some cases I rewrote or rearranged existing sections for greater clarity, and in all but “CSS and Documents” I’ve added a fair amount of new material.  I think they’re just as useful today as the older editions were in their day, and I hope you’ll agree.

Just to reiterate, these are the three pre-books currently available:

• CSS and Documents (free)  —  the basics of CSS and how it’s associated with HTML, covering things like link and style as well as obscure topics like HTTP header linking
• Selectors, Specificity, and the Cascade  —  including all of the level 3 selectors, examples of use, and how conflicts are resolved
• Values, Units, and Colors  —  fairly up to date, including HSL/HSLa/RGBa and the full run of X11-based keywords, and also the newest units except for the very, very latest — and as they firm up and gain support, we’ll add them into an update!

As future pre-books come out, I’ll definitely announce them here and in the usual social spaces.  I really think this is a good move for the book and the topic, and I’m very excited to explore this method of publishing with O’Reilly!

• ‘CSS: The Definitive Guide’, Fourth Edition was published on Monday, October 1st, 2012.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Projects, Standards, and Writing categories.
• There have been thirty-two replies.

Last Thursday was the first episode of The Web Behind, which was also episode #35 of The Web Ahead, and I couldn’t really have been much happier with it.  John Allsopp made it brilliant by being brilliant, as always.  To spend 80 minutes talking with someone with so much experience and insight will always be an act of pure joy. and we were beyond thrilled that he used the occasion to announce his Web History Timeline Project — a web-based timline which anyone can enrich by easily adding milestones.

The episode is up on 5by5, where there are a whole bunch of links to things that came up in the conversation; as well as on iTunes — so pick your favorite channel and listen away!  If you are an iTunes listener, Jen and I would be deeply grateful if you could give the show a quick review and rating, but please don’t feel that you’re somehow obligated to do so in order to listen!  We’ll be more than happy if people simply find all this as interesting as we do, and happier still if you find the shows interesting enough to subscribe via RSS or iTunes.

Guests are lining up for the next few shows, which will come about once every other week.  Jen is preparing a standalone web site where we’ll be able to talk about new and upcoming episodes, have a show archive, provide show information and wiki pages, and much more.  Great stories and perspectives are being uncovered.  Exciting times!

• The Web Behind #1 was published on Monday, September 24th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the History, The Web Behind, and Web categories.
• There have been four replies.

At lunch today (okay, by now it’s actually yesterday), I had some leftover time.  Not quite enough to play a shift on Radar Chaos: Hawaii Edition, sadly, but enough to run down the answer to a question that had been bugging me for a couple of days: if Mitt Romney is right that the 47% of people who pay no federal income taxes are all Obama voters that he needn’t worry about, what would the polls look like?

Finding out was as simple as hitting up Wikipedia, Gallup, and Excel.  Combining the two sources of information, I came up with this:

Income range	% of pop.	Obama	Romney
Less than $36,000	40.1%	56%	37%
$36,000 to $89,999	40.4%	47%	47%
$90,000 or more	19.5%	45%	50%

I used those income bands because they’re the divisions used in the Gallup results, and I got the percentage-of-population numbers from Wikpedia.  For simplicity’s sake, I decided to assume that Mitt was off by a bit and that only 40.1% of the electorate was lost to him — meaning that any person (or household) making more than $36,000 a year but paying no federal income tax due to writeoffs, tax credits, and so on was still in play.

So once you combine the percentages in that table and add up the results, you get 50.2% of the vote for Obama, and 43.6% of the vote for Romney.  That was likely true immediately post-DNC but is a wider split than the most recent polls show, which are usually close to being tied at 47% each.  So we’ll note that I’ve given Obama 3% too many and Romney 3% too few, and apply that correction at the end.

The next step was to shift all of the 40% of voters below $36,000 a year into the Obama column.

Income range	% of pop.	Obama	Romney
Less than $36,000	40.1%	100%	0%
$36,000 to $89,999	40.4%	47%	47%
$90,000 or more	19.5%	45%	50%

Once you do the math on those figures, the results are 67.9% of the vote for Obama and 28.7% of the vote for Romney.  Apply the ±3% correction from before and you wind up with Obama getting about 65% of the vote and Romney getting about 32%.  That’s substantially different than polls have been showing, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Mitt is mistaken about the composition of the electorate.

(Of course, as noted before, I spotted Mitt almost 7% of U.S. households by only shifting the bottom 40.1% to Obama instead of the bottom 47%.  You’re welcome, Mitt.)

Anyway, that was my every-half-decade analysis of public data, which I like to conduct both to look at things from a new angle as well as celebrate what the web has made possible: the ability to look deeper, to analyze, to ask questions and find answers, to verify.  Even hypotheticals.

• Words, Meet Data was published on Thursday, September 20th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the Politics category.
• There have been no replies.

Jen Simmons and I are very pleased to announce that our first guest on The Web Behind will be none other than John Allsopp.

Hailing from Sydney, Australia, John by himself has seen and done more on the web than most web teams put together.  First encountering the web in the early 1990s, he built one of the very first CSS tools, Style Master, and a number of other web development tools; published a wealth of information like support charts and free courses; wrote the deeply insightful and far-seeing article “A Dao of Web Design”; influenced the course of the Web Standards Project; and founded a successful international conference series that continues to this day.

We’re incredibly excited to have John as our inaugural guest, and hope you’ll join us for the live recording this Thursday, September 20th at 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific.  That’s also Friday, September 21st at 8am Sydney time, and 2200 UTC if you want to calculate your own local offsets.  The time zone dance is the reason we’re recording the first show at that particular time.  Moving forward, the plan is to record on Wednesdays, usually mid-afternoon (US Eastern) but sometimes in the morning — again, depending on the time zones of our guests.

Be able to say you were there when it all started:  please join us for the live recording, and subscribe to get the finished podcasts as they’re released.  We already have some great guests lined up for subsequent shows — more on that as we firm up dates and times — and some interesting plans for the future.  We really hope you’ll be there with us!

• John Allsopp to Inaugurate ‘The Web Behind’ was published on Tuesday, September 18th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the History, Projects, The Web Behind, and Web categories.
• There has been one reply.

Whenever I meet a new person and we get to talking about our personal lives, one of the things that seems to surprise people the most, besides the fact that I live in Cleveland and not in New York City or San Francisco, is that I have a Bachelor’s of Art in History.  The closest I came to Computer Science was a minor concentration in Artifical Intelligence, and in all honesty it was more of a philosophical study.

To me, history is vital.  As a species, we’ve made a plethora of mistakes and done myriad things right, and the record (and outcomes) of those successes and failures can tell us a great deal about how we got to where we are as well as where we might go.  (Also, from a narrative standpoint, history is the greatest and most authentic story we’ve ever told — even the parts that are untrue.)  The combination of that interest and my ongoing passion for the web is what led me to join the W3C’s recently formed Web History Community Group, where efforts to preserve (digital) historical artifacts are slowly coalescing.

But even more importantly, it’s what has led me to establish a new web history podcast in association with Jen Simmons of The Web Ahead.  The goal of this podcast, which is a subset of The Web Ahead, is to interview people who made the web today possible.  The guests will be authors, programmers, designers, vendors, toolmakers, hobbyists, academics: some whose names you’ll instantly recognize, and others who you’ve never heard of even though they helped shape everything we do.  We want to bring you their stories, get their insights and perspectives, and find out what they’ve been doing of late.  The Mac community has folklore.org; I hope that this podcast will help start to build an similar archive for the web.  You can hear us talk about it a bit on The Web Ahead #34, where we announce our first guest as well as the date and time for our first show!  (Semi-spoiler: it’s next week.)

Jen and I have took to calling this project The Web Behind in our emails, and the name stuck.  It really is a subset of The Web Ahead, so if you’re already subscribed to The Web Ahead, then episodes of The Web Behind will come to you automatically!  If not, and you’re interested, then please subscribe!  We already have some great guests lined up, and will announce the first few very soon.

I haven’t been this excited about a new project in quite some time, so I very much hope you’ll join Jen and me (and be patient as I relearn my radio chops) for a look back that will help to illuminate both our present and our future.

• The Web Behind was published on Tuesday, September 11th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the Culture, History, Projects, The Web Behind, and Web categories.
• There have been eight replies.

It’s a little bit hard to comprehend just how incredible a year we’ve had at An Event Apart.  Our colleagues in the audience as well as on stage have been consistently sharp, engaging, and all-around amazing, and I don’t think Jeffrey and I could thank everyone enough even if we were given three lifetimes to tackle the project.  With all seven shows this year selling out (some months in advance), we’ve taken the next step and have scheduled eight shows next year, a figure that occasionally causes me to go a little short of breath at the sheer wonder of it all.  I think back on the hundred-odd people who filled the room at our very first event, tucked away in the upper back corner of Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute back in 2005, and can scarcely believe how far we’ve come.

If you’re inclined to join us in 2013, and I really hope you are, here are the cities and dates:

• Atlanta – February 18-20
• Seattle – April 1-3
• San Diego – May 20-22
• Boston – June 24-26
• Washington, DC – August 5-7
• Chicago – August 26-28
• Austin – September 30-October 2
• San Francisco – December 9-11

Back to San Diego — hooray!  I looove to visit San Diego.

As was the case this year, all eight of 2013’s shows will feature a mix of new and familiar speakers presenting all-new talks shedding light on old problems and new ideas.  Thus not every show’s lineup is yet complete:  while we already have some speakers confirmed and announced for every event, we’re leaving the later shows in the year open so we can add fresh speakers and timely content.

Since all eight shows went on sale last month we’ve already had a bunch of people register, so you should definitely get those approval processes moving now if you want to avoid being shut out.  We had lengthy waiting lists at every 2012 show, and there were very few cancellations.  It never feels good to turn people away, but the venues’ capacities are what they are!

Being a part of An event Apart has been an amazing experience for me and for so many people, and our overriding goal is to make 2013 even better.  I hope you’ll join us!

• An Event Apart 2013 was published on Monday, September 10th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the An Event Apart and Projects categories.
• There have been two replies.