Next month is the first bday of my son.
A year ago, for the occasion, I set up some kind of blog so our closest friends and family could share some thoughts before the delivery, and we always said we’d publish a book for his 1st bday, with the content of the site.
Comes in the timing issue: less than 30 days until the dead line and everything left to do: designing, editing, printing, posting…
Approximatively 500 hundreds posts, 100 pictures, 150 pages, and 50 copies to make.
Designing, took only a few hours, printing via Lulu will take a small week, the problem was editing.
Well, guess what: it only took a few hours. (OK, it’s a little easier said than done, but it pretty much sums up the thing).
I still have to deal with a few bugs, mainly due to my experimenting while producing, but instead of the 30+ hours it would have taken manually, I think it will be finished in less than 5 hours, including research and development of the PHP/XML part.

This means particularly much to me. I have been in the designing/publishing business for more than 15 years, and have been toying with Web technologies for a few years. And tonight, both of my worlds ran into each other and produced something quite satisfying.
This is a good day and a really nice way to start 2009.

This is not a HowTo post, and I don’t plan to do one. If you want more info, contact me.