I’m doing the proof edit of my book, this is my last chance to fix typos or correct errors.

Naively, I thought there wouldn’t be very many because I’d already had my draft copies (written in Pages and converted to Word) reviewed by me, two tech editors, my acquisitions editor, my development editor, my copy editor, and me again.

HOLY SHIT! was I ever wrong.

You see, whenever the copy editor made a change to one of my headlines, that resulted in crazy stuff happening in the Word conversion. Interestingly enough, I wasn’t seeing it in my copy of the .doc files, but when it would get to the production department, they’d be left with headlines that read such things as:

What What What

and my personal favorite, two sections in a row titled:

Choosing

Now, I’m all for choosing and asking questions, but that’s not what my book was trying to say.

So now I’m working on a chapter with a long table of commands. These commands are case-sensitive. But however my document was imported, some of those commands went from lowercase to title case. In other words: <code>create link</code> became <code>Createlink</code> and so on. This was probably some auto-capitalizing feature in whatever program they were using to convert my .doc files into the production-ready files. But it’s still upsetting.

I Can’t Even Imagine Proofreading a Document Submitted in Longhand!

And there was a time when all books were written in longhand and some poor (probably underpaid) person was expected to convert the writer’s (almost certainly) illegible writing into print blocks. I feel very sorry for that person.

Then they moved to typewriters, and the author probably received a galley printing of their work that they were expected to read through and correct. I can imagine, extrapolating from the number of errors I find today—using computers—that approximately every tenth word was written correctly in the galleys. I, like many writers I know, hate to edit and proofread. (Thus I come rant about it here…) But I am thanking my lucky stars that I was born in the era of the computer. That seems like it’s made it at least slightly easier.

I Promise to Never Whine About a Typo Again

Okay, I’ll continue to whine about lame errors online, but I won’t whine about errors in print books. I reserve judgement on ebooks until my book comes out in ebook form and I have to start cringing because of all the errors there… ☺ But hopefully, I’m catching most of the errors in this book. I’m sure there is at least one really horribly egregious one that I haven’t caught and will go all the way through to the second or third edition. But I hope not.

I was reading an article yesterday about how facial recognition is getting so good that there are apps being built for cellphones that can identify random strangers from photos (taken as you walk along with your cell phone).

The article was bemoaning the fact that this was a “further invasion of our privacy” and that pretty soon nothing we do would be private.

I then moved on to another article that talked about how Google(?) was working on an algorithm that could evaluate the writing style of someone online and make a good correlation as to who actually wrote it. Even if the author had posted anonymously or with a pseudonym.

The article was bemoaning the fact that this was a “further invasion of our privacy” and that pretty soon nothing that we do online would be private.

But is this idea of “privacy” such a good thing? Ultimately, what it really is is the idea that we can go out in public or online and be anonymous.

And some people see anonymity as the same as the freedom to do anything they want. And as we saw in London over the past few days, anything they want seems to cover a wide swath of things that most civilized societies consider wrong.

Some examples of things anonymous people do:

• looting and destroying property
• verbally harassing people
• generally behaving like boorish trolls

And people who are willing to stand up and say who they are, thus taking responsibility for their actions, tend to avoid these actions, not necessarily because they don’t want to do them, but because they know that they are impugning on their good name if they do so. Because they are not anonymous.

I think of the (moronic) individuals who went looting in London and then posted photos of themselves and their spoils online. With face recognition software, they are no longer anonymous. And they can be held responsible for their crimes.

Internet trolls who write hateful comments on forums and blogs just because they are anonymous might think twice if they knew that their comments would be identified as being from them. And even if they didn’t think twice, their friends and family might have a better idea of what thugs they are friends with or related to.

I wish more people would stand up for their actions, and stop hiding behind anonymity.

I finished Chapter 19 last night. Very stoked. It’s moving along quite nicely. Chapter 20 is currently Offline Web Applications. But I think I need to re-order it to put Web Storage before it.

The other thing writing this is doing is making me more and more interested in writing a new theme for this blog. I’ll make it HTML5, but I’m not sure if I’ll use my art for it or not. I’ll have to think about it. Of course, that isn’t going to happen until after the book is completed.

In Jaryth news:

• He was driving with Mark and they passed the place where we had the (minor) accident in the truck last year on July 4th weekend. And Jaryth says to Mark “Truck broke!” Holy cow, he remembers that?
• He refers to the shed as “the big door” only now he’s starting to call it the “shad” and I am calling it “the big door.”

If you didn’t know, I’m working on a book—Sams Teach Yourself HTML5 for Mobile Application Development in 24 Hours, and it’s been taking up a lot of my time.

I just finished chapter 17—HTML5 Links. Whew! And I hope to have chapter 18 done by Saturday.

It’s hard because this weekend was the first really sunny weekend we’ve had all year, and I had to sit inside for a good portion of it writing about HTML5 Drag and Drop. (Thanks, Sandi, for the suggestion for how to lengthen it! While I didn’t implement your suggestions—it ended up long enough without any sex scenes—I’m still looking forward to writing Drag and Drop—the “Good Parts” Version!)

The most common complaint I see about content farms is that they serve up lousy information written by under-paid (or non-paid) writers. I can join the ranks of people who will tell you of the lousy results they found on eHow (or insert your other favorite content farm to bash) here. Yes, I don’t like doing a search for “how to build a web page” and getting a result that says, essentially: step 1. build a web page, step 2. put it on the internet. step 3. there’s no step 3!

But I am equally tired of the writers saying “I make a living writing and they are turning writing into a commodity!” And other such statements. Guess what, Virginia, writing has always been considered something anyone can do – and as such paid as little as possible for. Yes, every writer I know, including myself, recognizes that writing is hard. To get up in the morning, stumble to the computer and stare at that blank screen is a fate all writers share. To know that you may or may not get paid a living wage for whatever pearls make it to that screen puts even more pressure on. And to then go out and read about how some moron was paid 3 cents to write the above “article” on how to build a web page is both depressing and demeaning. Some days, I start thinking that I should just start writing tutorials that are that meaningless (and I’m sure some of my “fans” would argue that I already do…). After all, that “tutorial” took me longer to think up than it did to write.

But ultimately I believe in market forces (says the woman who has been known to rant for hours, yes hours, on the evils of laissez faire capitalism). If the content that is created by these under- and non-paid writers is lousy people won’t read them. And if it gets too bad, people won’t visit the sites that generate them. Then the sites won’t make any money and they will either focus on getting more non-paid writers to flood the internet with crap or they will come around to the idea that paying good writers something slightly more than peanuts is a way to get better quality content. Personally, I am hesitant when a search result feeds up an eHow or wikipedia article. Not because the writers are underpaid but because I’ve found the content to be less than stellar.

And the other thing to think about: how much are you paying for the content that you read? I have friends who are proud of the fact that they view all websites with ad blockers on. Others that refuse to pay any subscription fees for content. And others who think that buying a book that was “just their blog posts” is tantamount to complete idiocy. I had a discussion with my brother a while ago where he told me he didn’t want to work with a money manager because “they just want more money”. And I thought, “well, sure, who doesn’t?” I mean seriously, how can one complain that writers aren’t being paid enough when you aren’t willing to pay them yourself? I buy and read over 100 (probably closer to 200) books per year. I have donated to websites and blogs that I find valuable, and do so every year. In this case, I think paying it forward means literally paying. And I’m okay with that, because if I like a writer I want them to keep writing so I buy their books.

And another thought: what makes Wikipedia so damn popular and “content farms” so not? I have found the content on Wikipedia to be just as questionable as eHow. And the writers there aren’t paid, in fact every year the Wikipedia founder asks them to pay him! But that’s a rant for another day.