Alright, after writing on it for four evenings and on one flight in between watching Watchmen and “The Boat that rocked” I am proud to present you:

• The Developer Evangelist handbook

The handbook explains several things:

• What developer evangelism is
• What makes a good developer evangelist
• How to write for the web
• How to use social media and the web to promote content
• How to deliver great presentations
• How to deal with criticism of your company and what to do with the competition
• How to write easy to understand and useful code examples

The handbook is Creative Commons and free to use. I am working on getting a printed version out, too.

Here are shortcuts to the chapters:

• The developer evangelism handbook
• Defining developer evangelism
• Start with the right mindset
• Find your role and play to your strengths
• Remove the brand
• Work with the competition
• Prepare for outreach
• Get speaking opportunities
• Deliver a talk or workshop
• Write great posts and articles
• Write excellent code examples
• Record your output
• Know and use the (social) web
• Work with the conference buzz
• Additional presentation tips
• Thanks!

You can also go to the full table of contents.

Things that made me happy this morning

• I’m working on a handbook for developer evangelists (the outline is here) and I am 7000 words in – after 2 days of writing.
• Billboard have released an API which gets you access to all kind of music charts. I’d love to mash that up with the Spotify API, but I won’t buy a premium account just to do some hacking.
• EtherPad is a very cool tool for collaborative text editing. Much like SubEthaEdit for the web – or like Bespin of course
• Vanish is an solution to create web content that self destructs after a certain time (much like these messages in the spy movies).
• Hey IT is a campaign to tell your IT department just how much IE6 makes kitty cry.
• phMagick is not a skin conditioner, but a pretty cool PHP wrapper for imageMagick to convert images, add drop shadows and so on. CSS3 for all browsers!
• JSON Formatter is a validation and pretty printing tool for JSON.
• There is a pretty sweet isometric timeline animation of the international space station at USA Today (you know, the newspaper you always stumble over when you leave hotel rooms)
• Fancy Fast Food shows you how you can turn fast food into very pretty meals
• 10 historical software bugs with disastrous consequences teaches us to fix our code.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• The source code of the moon landing control programs has been released as open source. Now get soldering and build the hardware in Arduino. I also checked the code and could not find a fake call!
• MapQuest released their driving directions web service
• AnythingZoomer is a jQuery script that provides you with a little lens to zoom parts of the screen. Nothing new, but potentially useful.
• Open a banana like a monkey is one of those videos that makes you go “why did I do it wrong my whole life?”
• Apparently rounded corners are all the rage in remedy packages – Apple has a lot to answer for, but I like it.
• Moddims is an Apache module that uses ImageMagick to convert pictures on the fly. Great for a thumbnail API.
• Make magazine has a cool EeePC hardware notifier hack that embeds an LED into the casing which flashes in different colours depending on you getting an IM, an email or a Tweet.
• IBM has a long and detailed article on using jQuery with JSON-P
• Opera’s Hallvord shows us the most expensive line of JavaScript ever

• Annathered’s Bento tips complete with gems like how to make a radish Mario mushroom
• Klaus Komenda has another great blog post, this time explaining the transition from YUI2 to YUI3 as a developer
• Warcraft explained with Super Mario – for us older people
• Paypal started a developer outreach blog and published a very nice interview with me on the topic of accessibility – not sure why it is https though
• MIT has some very interesting research on wearable computers – soon you might me able to dial a number in your palm without the mobile
• Threadless now started to do customizable cakes (well as a contest – not overnight)
• AMEE released realtime carbon showing how much every unit of electricity in the UK currently costs us in CO₂
• A very detailed look into the etymology of computer game character names dives into hitherto unknown depths of geekdom.
• A lovely (but NSFW because of swearing) typographical animation of the famous Pulp Fiction ‘What does Marsellus Wallace look like’ speech

Over the course of the weekend I finished polishing GeoMaker and uploaded the source to GitHub. So now you can use GeoMaker or its API and also host them on your own server.

The new features include:

• Embedding of Geo microformats into a text when originally you wanted to analyse a text and intermediate text display.
• Turning RSS feeds into maps (much like RSS2Map) with an intermediate filtering step
• Total re-code (includes instead of one massive chunk, configuration and labels file)
• Help and About and Developer docs

See the changes in action in the following screencast (the design of the RSS preview has changed since – more obvious now):

The next steps will be to allow for multiple map providers. Got any other ideas?

• Download GeoMaker on GitHub
• Visit GeoMaker