P.O. Box 98
Ridgway, Colorado 81432
970-626-5565
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Technology
The publishing process involves lots and lots of technology. Here's the technology I use to create and publish the Broomstick books.
| Web hosting and e-mail | Digital Space |
| Domain names | SimpleURL.com (very inexpensive and excellent service) |
| Web authoring | Textpad. All html and php is hand-coded. |
| Picture editing | ULead PhotoImpact 4.2, which is pretty old (See www.ulead.com for a much more current version. ULead is now part of Corel.) (I also have Adobe Photoshop Elements, but the learning curve is steep and I'm not there yet.) |
| FTP | Ipswitch WS_FTP Pro |
| First place to look for information on any subject | Wikipedia |
| Geographic Visualization | DeLorme Topo USA 7.0 (For Broom 1 I used version 4.0) and Google Earth (probably the most amazing thing on the Internet today!) |
| The best motivation in the world to write book-length fiction (yes, this is how the Broom series started) | The National Novel Writing Month is held every November. |
| Text creation and editing | Microsoft Word 97 (yes, that's really old, too!). If you are starting a big project from scratch, consider the very fully-featured and absolutely free Open Office Suite. |
| Cover creation and editing | Microsoft PowerPoint 97 (yep, 11 years old this year). |
| Conversion to PDF | Foxit PDF Creator, but note the glitch at the bottom of page 106 of Broom 2. |
| Mailing Lists | AWeber |
| ISBN, barcodes | ISBN.org. ISBNs are amazingly expensive. And getting the barcode .tiff is also amazingly expensive. I use Bowker Bar Codes. |
| Printing | Axess Printing |
| Order Taking (Shopping Cart) | PayPal |
| Shipping | U.S. Postal Service |
| Site usage tracking | Google Analytics. These folks protect your privacy—I have no access to specific individuals, just summary reports. |
| Advertising | ThisIsTrue, Inc., also Google Adwords |
| Test Environment | You may have noticed all the site's web pages end with .php instead of .htm. That allows me to do "server side includes" which makes site maintenance much, much easier. But testing the new pages requires a set of software on my local computer to test php pages. It's called "wampserver" and is free. It includes an Apache webserver, a php interpreter, and a SQLite database server. Pretty cool! |
| Comment Form Provider | www.freedback.com, a Canadian firm, provides the comment forms and filters out all the spam that would otherwise come my way. |
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