During the dot com implosion that started in 2001, I was working for a managed web hosting company whose customer base evaporated with the unrealistic euphoria of the Internet. For over two and a half years we were faced with quarterly layoffs till my team of 20 was reduced to a pair of traumatized professionals.
I had been hired for my network engineering skills but I clearly needed to demonstrate additional value to the accountants to maintain any hope of remaining on the payroll. With restricted budgets, the free Linux operating system was becoming the choice of our new startup clients and knowledge of its functionality was viewed as a significant advantage. So I decided to buy a second hand PC and turned it into a small laboratory to learn more. I also set up a small website dedicated to art from my native Caribbean. Websites were cool and the web hosting company I used made it so easy with their GUI web interface.
One day at work I overheard some friends saying that they were hosting their websites from home using their DSL line. There was no GUI, but they made it seem easy. They convinced me to buy a second hand PC, get Linux and move Simiya literally “in-house” to save $10 per month.
Of course extending my UNIX skills to Linux wasn’t so easy. I generally found a majority of Linux resources on the web to be too detailed, too vague or just inaccurate. There were many excellent articles on specific topics, but they were usually part of a general interest publication, and information on related topics on the same site was sometimes hard to find.
There just wasn’t a site out there for intermediate Linux home users who wanted to get their feet wet in web hosting, nor did there seem to be any similar sites targeting the poor IT people who are told to “get Linux working by tomorrow”.
After a few months I decided that no one should have to repeat my pain and I added some technical pages to the art site. Soon, Linux Home Networking was born.
The first technical page I wrote was about configuring wireless networking for Linux mainly because my wife didn’t like the server in the bedroom. I got it all set up, but somehow everything remained under the bed until one Autumn morning when the ancient computer began to grumble very loudly. Based on the rattling noises from the hard disk I thought it was going to explode. The web server logs showed that the site had been found by Google and apparently hundreds of people per day were having the same problem.
Soon the Linux site expanded to about three dozen tutorials, each targeting the topics of the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exam which I was eventually planning to take. The interest in the site expanded till it was receiving about 10,000 visits a day and I decided to move the server to a real data center. To cover this additional cost I started selling 600 page PDF versions of the site with content much more detailed than any of the RHCE books I had used as references.
I wanted to convert the PDFs into a real book and decided to approach all the publishers at LinuxWorld San Francisco to see whether they were interested. Armed with my web statistics and a few sample search engine for pertinent key words like “linux iptables” where the site featured prominently I arrived at my appointments made three weeks in advance to make my pitch. Prentice Hall eventually published the book as the Linux Quick Fix Notebook which has received very encouraging reviews.
I have some advice for authors. Technical books age, and I have found that keeping PDFs up to date is much faster and easier to do. It took 3 months to edit and format the book, and another 4 months to get it printed and distributed. With PDFs, modifications are instantaneous in comparison, and it is very easy to distribute an updated version of the PDF to all your readers. Make forums a part of your book’s website as you can use the questions found there to make quick updates.
I am now toying with the idea of using a similar approach to write a novel about a ficticious Caribbean island. I wrote the story 10 years ago, but never had the will to publish it till now. This time I’ll make each chapter a blog entry and see what the readership reaction will be. I’ll alter the story according to suggestions of the commentators, and who knows, maybe I’ll write another real book on a vastly different topic that appeals much less to the geek in me.
