When I released the developer evangelism handbook it was quite a success but a lot of people asked for a print version. I’ve asked a few publishers if they are interested but the common consensus was either “too short” or “too niche”. I’d be happy to prove them wrong so I used Lulu.com for publishing the book myself. So if you are not a fan of the free online version, go over there and get your copy.

• Read the book online http://developer-evangelism.com/
• Get the PDF or print version of the book from Lulu.com for GBP 11.31

Things that made me happy this morning:

• I finished a new chapter for the Developer Evangelism Handbook – dealing with your own company
• Google has a safe browsing API that allows you to tap into their malware and spyware database. Sadly enough there is no search or match function – only load a full list of MD5 hashes – and the docs are not the easiest to understand.
• At a recent State Department Town Hall Meeting, one of Hillary Clinton’s staffers asked why IE6 was still mandated. Attagirl, more of this – challenge the laziness.
• You can browse WordNet – the database that Google’s AdSense content matching was based on
• Simon Whatley has 10 commandments of social media
• A nice explanation of rounded corners with CSS3 although it is more of a “here’s how to do it in Firefox and Safari”.
• Apparently you can milk hamsters – there is even a book about it.
• A splendid Wall-E/Star Wars photo mashup from Worth1000
• Space War is a cute little game for the iPhone in CSS/JS/HTML/
• Another nice colourblindness simulator – please, do not add another badge, even if you succeed the test.
• OER commons is a great resource for free teaching and learning content
• Some very sweet Eco friendly packaging concepts

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.