Ric Shreves is a web applications consultant and author. He has published books on WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Mambo and Ubuntu. Ric is also the lead analyst on several industry white papers, including the Open Source CMS Market Share Report (from water&stone) and travel industry white papers from PhoCusWright Consulting. He is the founder of digital agency water&stone and is presently focused on creating a new travel startup: GottaGetaway, a Singapore-based company offering users a better way to find, plan and book their travel online.
My latest book with Packt Publishing was released today: Joomla! Search Engine Optimization. The name pretty much says it all -- this is a highly focused specialty text concerning how to achieve search engine optimization with a Joomla-powered website.
Here's the synopsis from the publisher's site:
In Detail
Decisions have been made, wheels set in motion. After publishing more than one dozen books with traditional publishers – both small and large, I have decided to dip my toes into the world of self-publishing. Why am I making this move? A number of reasons, to be honest. Some are commercial, some are philosophical, some are simply practical.
My first publishing contracts came many years ago – the mid Eighties. At that time I wrote a couple of practice manuals for the legal profession. They were, frankly, awful and probably satisfied no one, including most certainly myself. I was jaded by that and stayed out of publishing for a long time after that experience. I got back into writing in 1995 while working as the multi-media editor for a small publishing house in Korea. As is typical with smaller houses, my role bridged several publishing functions. It wasn’t long before I drifted into the author role and, as unlikely as it sounds, I wrote a number of children’s books, mostly about famous artists (think it’s easy? Try describing Cubism to pre-teens).
I've released the first little taste of the new ebook project I'm working on. The new book, HowTo: WordPress 3, is scheduled for final release 15 July. In the meantime, check out this article over at OpenSourceCMS.pro -- this is from Chapter 1 of the HowTo: WordPress 3. - ric.
WordPress comes in two flavors, a hosting blogging service and a downloadable content management system (CMS) that you host yourself. The two versions have the same name – a source of frequent confusion. If you are evaluating WordPress, one of the first questions you need to ask yourself is which flavor of WordPress is right for you. Like most things, there are pros and cons to both approaches and though the cost of moving from one system to the other is quite low, it’s better to get this right the first time around and save yourself some trouble.
WordPress, the hosted blogging service, is a commercial venture run by Automattic, the company behind the whole WordPress family of products. The blogging service can be found at http://wordpress.COM. WordPress, the open source CMS system that is the subject of this book, is a non-commercial venture run by a large community of volunteers. The CMS can be found at http://wordpress.ORG.
We present here, for your consideration, a list of the advantages and disadvantages of each system – there is not one “right answer” – how you prioritize the issues is up to you.
I spent a good portion of this week in meetings with various companies and individuals in the Singapore travel industry. There were some interesting chats and some great feedback on what we're doing here at GottaGetaway. One of the most interesting conversations concerned how online travel is evolving. In short, the discussion went something like this:
The first phase of online travel was the arduous task of putting inventory online and making it possible for members of the general public to make (and pay for) a confirmed booking without the necessity of human intervention. This phase was a beast. Travel had historically been solely the realm of authorized agents, and being an agent often meant extensive training, licensing and in many countries, bonding. I'm not sure it's possible for someone who's grown up in the era of online travel to fully grasp what a big change it was for tickets to be sold online without a human being involved. The process of finding, reserving and then writing a physical ticket that had to be delivered to the client was the way travel booking was done until only just recently. All of us who are in this business today owe everything to those early travel innovators who cracked this nut. But, it was only the beginning...
>> Read the entire post on the GottaGetaway Blog
Packt is pleased to announce WordPress 3 Cookbook , a new book that covers over 100 recipes to help users to develop their WordPress site.
