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From MitchWiki

1 Introduction
2 eBooks
- 2.1 Why just give content away?
3 Notes
4 My Domains
5 Using MediaWiki

Introduction

Mitch Allen is a writer, webmaster, blogger and podcast producer. He has worked for companies such as Lotus, Dictaphone and Dragon Systems. He has also worked as a software consultant for Fleet Bank, The New York Times, IBM and Caterpillar. He is currently the producer behind the Rockosphere podcast.

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eBooks

Please note that these eBooks are in the process of being written. You get to see my drafts live as they happen. The content is subject to change.

Eclipse - [Draft] An introduction to the free open source Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used in my other eBooks.
JavaScript - [Draft] An introduction to the JavaScript programming language.
PHP and MySQL - [Draft] - Getting the most out of PHP and MySQL.
Code Generation - [Draft] - Techniques for cranking out code in record time.
Apache Tomcat - [Draft] - Installing and using the Apache Tomcat server add-on for XAMPP.
Second Life Scripting - [Draft] An introduction to the Linden Scripting Language.
Adobe After Effects - [Draft] Covering advanced topics such as scripting.
Lightwave - [TBD] Lightwave is a 3D modeling program.
Podcasting 101 - [Draft] How to get started in Podcasting.
WebMaster 101 - [Draft] How to be the master of your own Web domain.
Genetic Programming - [Draft] Genetic Programming introduction and tutorials.

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Why just give content away?

After having written three books and studying the problem for a long time, I am 100% convinced that no one should ever write a book with the intent of making money at it. Here are some stats from Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail:

"In 2004, 950,000 books out of 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen BookScan sold fewer than ninety-nine copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Ony 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells 500 copies. In other words, about 98 percent of books are non-commercial, whether they were intended that way or not."

I'm not opposed to the idea of creating hard copies of each final draft in book form. It seemed to work out quite well for Seth Godin's book Unleashing the Ideavirus.

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Notes

Here are my notes and links to articles that interest me.

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My Domains

I am the Webmaster for several domains:

http://www.indiemashup.com - a project that I may toast due to time (I want to spend more time working on producing video's)
http://www.mindblowingvideo.com - currently being moved to a new ISP and redesigned.
http://www.mitchallen.com - changed from a blog format to a wiki format, where I will create free eBooks
http://www.priscillagrogan.com - the first pass includes a link to her eBook on software quality assurance
http://www.rockoftheday.com - we've decided to fold this into rockosphere.com
http://www.rockosphere.com - the home page for my interview and music podcast
http://www.scriptable.com - Needs a major overhaul (wiki and forum - toast the blog)
http://www.scriptable2.com - my first pass at creating a wiki-based site. Will probably fry it once I rev up the original 1.0 site and migrate the content.