So tonight after work and before the St. Louis .Net User Group meeting I ran to Borders to see if I could find my book on the shelf. Well guess what, I did!

I was pretty stoked to find it, but was shocked to only see the DNN4 book on the shelf, not any of the other DNN books. Well after digging around for a while I found them on another section, so I took the opportunity to organize a little :D Here’s the result.

DotNetNuke is an open source framework for building websites quickly and easily. It is built on, and runs on Microsoft technology, and is extensible through the use of extensions known as modules, skins and providers. There is a whole ecosystem of websites that provide services and extensions for DNN, some free, some paid for. DNN is an extremely powerful tool when in the right hands, I could point you to a million sites built using the platform, but why should I when you are already on one!

I started working on a book last August with a coworker of mine, Patrick Renner. In March/April we had everything finished up and the book was handed off to the production department to get squared away. Two weeks ago I received my first copies and the book started shipping out to vendors. The book is titled DotNetNuke 5 User's Guide, How to get your website up and running. https://bit.ly/dnnbook

If you're looking for an easy way to learn how to use DotNetNuke be sure to check out our book. We wrote it to try to fill a gap in the DNN ecosystem, and to provide a good resource for people who are brand new to DNN and want to learn how to create a site and manage the content on that site. https://bit.ly/dnnbook

You can purchase it from Amazon.com

So it’s just after 1am on Monday March 9th, 2009. Pat Renner and I have wrapped up and submitted the final chapter of our DotNetNuke book. We are far from complete on the whole book writing process, but we are at least at the big milestone of being done with the majority of the writing of the book.

Now we begin the process of editing our chapters that we are getting back from the editor and technical editor. I got the first chapter back for author review before my trip to Orlando last week but had to set it aside and focus on finishing up the writing process before starting on it. Tonight (Monday) will begin the process of the author review and cleaning up the materials so that they can be sent off to the production department.

The book writing process is interesting, fun, painful, a great education experience. I’ve learned so much about DNN, but more importantly about how to communicate what I know about DNN in an easy to understand manner. At least I hope I have! I guess we will find out when people start reading the book!

I’ll post more about my trip to Orlando later this week, I wish I had stayed another night to watch the Kepler launch, but because the book wasn’t finished I had to get home.

So it’s Monday Tuesday morning and I just sent off my submission for the third chapter of our DotNetNuke book. Pat sent of his third chapter last week, he has one more to finish up, I have one and then we have one final chapter we are going to work on together as a closing/advanced topics section for the book. Our deadline is 2/20, I think we’ll be on target to get things finished up on time, if not on time a day or two late over that weekend. I’m looking forward to being “done” for a while, though I don’t imagine I will be slowing down anytime soon.

After the book chapters are all submitted I imagine we’ll start getting the chapters back from the editors with changes. I also will be registering for an online economics course so that I can get the last few credits I need to finish up my BS in Econ in time for our summer move.

Update: it looks like the publish date for the book has been pushed back to 6/22/09 according to Amazon.

So this weekend has flown by! It’s almost 1:30am on Monday morning and I am wrapping up writing another chapter for the book. I’m going to call it a night and try to finish up the remainder of the work tomorrow, I basically have to read/review the chapter and take screenshots and then I can submit it to the editor.

So what have I been up to this weekend? Well Friday night Natalie and I watched Wanted, an Angelina Jolie movie, I must say the movie wasn’t what we expected, I knew it would be silly, but this one was exceptionally hard to believe because of the stunts/effects.

Saturday my buddy Terec and I spent the day driving around MO and IL hunting Bald Eagles. Now, before you freak out, we were hunting them to take photos! We rented a very $$$ lens from a local camera shop and spent nearly 11 hours driving around trying to get great shots. I took way more photos than he did, at a rate of about 4 to 1, but I would say from the previews I’ve seen of his, he got way better photos than I did. I can however claim the closest/largest in flight shot as I had grabbed the big lens at one point in Pere Marquette park, just after that a Bald Eagle came soaring by.

I’ve only uploaded a few shots, you can see them over on Flickr.

After shooting all day we ended up back at my house, Nick came over and Natalie got back from her girl’s night out with her sister. We rocked out to Rockband2 for a few hours before I kicked the guys out and crashed for the evening. I slept in this morning and then headed off to the office to meet up with Pat and talk about the next two weeks of book work. We are coming up on our February 20th deadline quickly! We are anxious to be done with this first phase of writing, and looking forward to hopefully having something resembling downtime during the editing/reviewing process! We’ll see how that works out :D

So last year I made it all the way through April with blogging at least once a day, and while it will look like I blogged on the 7th, the date for that post was really on the 6th. This is posting on the 8th, so, I made it 6 days before I missed a blog post :(

I guess I will have to try again NEXT year to blog every day of the year. I tell you, this week has been nuts, if you follow my twitter feed at all, I posted that I already have 33 hours in our time tracker, after just three days of work. I have a lot left to go, and another book deadline for next week, along with travelling out of town next week. It looks like it will be another busy weekend!

I am going to make time to see a movie with my wife, we’re going to go see Gran Torino on Friday night.

So December 15th was our first book deadline. Pat and I met early Sunday morning and went through both of our chapters making some reviews. He ended up submitting his chapter on the 15th, mine was submitted late due to some pretty major overhauls we made to the structure of the chapter. I found the first chapter hard to write, I think the next few chapters will be easier. Chapter 1 was the intro/overview of all things, so it was hard to try to wrap all that information up into basic content that our intended reader will be able to understand.

We’re waiting on feedback from our editor for the submitted chapters, hopefully we’ll get some of that before our next deadline of 1/15, otherwise we feel like we’re writing blind. We’ve already started on the next chapters for the deadline, I’m dealing more with actual DNN content in these chapters, so I think they will be much easier to write now.

More updates in the future.

So I’m home this weekend working on the book, our first deadline is on Monday, so Pat and I are both working on finishing up our submissions. To procrastinate a little I decided to do a quick search on Amazon, not expecting to find it, but I did! I found a listing for our book! Here it is!

DotNetNuke 5 User's Guide: Get Your Website Up and Running

Now, I must get back to writing.

Pat and I have been meeting the past two weeks going over materials and thoughts for the book we are writing about DotNetNuke. I’ve worked on it quite a bit in that time frame, but with all my travelling in October and work as a result of that travelling I had only spent time flushing out the topics for my first chapter, trying to organize what I want to write about. But not actually starting the writing process around that content. My plan is to flush out as much as possible before hand and then write based on that assortment of information, I think this will help me organize my content and make sure I hit the topics I want to for each chapter and sections within those chapters.

So tonight I got into the actual writing process, and what did I write about? Something that wasn’t included in my flushed outline for the chapter. :) I did however go back and add that information to my outline so that I can look at my outlines for each chapter during and after the writing and locate exactly where I covered items for reference purposes.

It’s now 1:30am, far later than I had planned to go to sleep, but Natalie is out of town so I took the time to get started. Pat and I are meeting to go over where we are so far, my goal is to have my first chapter ready for submission by the 15th of the month, I think if I spend an hour or two each day, preferably more this weekend, working on it I can make that happen.

More updates later in the process!