WayWest

Back from the dead with a new book

My upcoming book from Peachpit Press, FileMaker Pro 8 VQS, went off to the printer on May 23. If you pre-ordered a copy, it should be shipping June 15.

If you haven't ordered it yet, click over to Peachpit where you can buy it for $22.49 or just $17.49 if you join their book club.

After sending off the book, I took a little time off to hike in the Adirondacks in upstate New York and the Green Mountains in nearby Vermont. Photos later but suffice to say that I'm recharged and will be posting excerpts and example files at my main web site: waywest.

Creating category feeds

Forgive the intrusion of this back-of-the-blog entry on the page here. I'm trying to set up category feeds so that readers can, for example, subscribe to a feed for just my FileMaker-related posts or just my Digital Photo posts. Normally things are easy to set up in TypePad, the service/program driving this blog. This isn't, hence this test post.

Once I work through the kinks, I'll offer several different feeds to give readers more choices.

Living the back-logged life

An Entirely Other Day gets it exactly right in describing my current life (and probably everyone else's):

The statistics are terrifying. All this is currently pending:
Voice-mail messages at work: 3
Voice-mail messages at home: 2
Voice-mail messages on my cell: 1
SMS messages on my cell: 4
Hours of television on the TiVo: 13
E-mail messages at home: 15
E-mail messages at work: 28
Items in my feed reader: 313
Books on my nightstand: 8

Except, I don't have a TiVo (or even cable at this point). And my feed reader has 1,132 unread posts. On the upside, thanks to filters and sheer relentlessness, my email's Inbox is empty.

Oh, and that May 4th deadline for FileMaker 8 VQS? It's now May 25th, which is not good news.

Deadlines stifle posts, or do posts bust deadlines?

I'm hard on deadline revising my upcoming book from Peachpit Press: FileMaker Pro 8 VQS.

Now that FileMaker makes relational databases much easier, I'm doing a major rewrite on how that affects designing your databases. So I'm trying to be disciplined and not post much until I shove the book off to the printer on May 4.

Pre-orders can be made here.