Housekeeping - December, 2019

Here we go again, with a little site news for the end of the year. Let’s take a quick peek behind the curtain, shall we?

New Edition of Learning Markdown Coming in Early 2020

This one’s been in the pipeline for a while, but I’ll soon have a bit of time on my hands to do the job. What job? Updating Learning Markdown. The next edition of the book will have additional information about formatting, a look at some tools and alternative flavours of Markdown, and a few other surprises.

I don’t have a date on which I’ll be releasing the new edition — probably sometime in late January or early February. Keep watching this space for an announcement.

If you’ve bought a copy of Learning Markdown, thank you. The update is free. You should receive a notification about the new edition when I publish it. If you don’t, let me know and I’ll send you a copy.

Interview Series

Eight Questions for …, my interview series, picked up a bit towards the end of 2019. I have an interview or two in the pipeline, but I’m always looking for new people to discuss how they use plain text.

Don’t worry if you don’t think you’re interesting or techie enough. You are, and you don’t have to be (respectively). Your plain text story matters as much as mine, or anyone else’s, does.

If you are interested being interviewed, get in touch. Just remember to select Interview me! from the Why You’re Contact Me list on the form. I’m looking forward to talking to you.

A Recent Surge of Interest in the Site

Earlier this month, I received a pile of messages from the site’s contact form. By a pile, I mean more messages in one day than I received in the last 12 months.

I wasn’t sure why that was happening. A couple of days later, a friend mentioned that The Plain Text Project was featured on the main page of Hacker News. That was a surprise.

It was nice to get some exposure, and I received some good feedback (both praise and constructive criticism) along with pointers to some new resources and tools. The flip side of that, though, was the usual set of snarky and pedantic and nit-picking messages; those were minor annoyances more than anything else.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in. If I wasn’t able to reply to you, it’s more me than you.

And to the person who submitted the site to Hacker News, thank you. I think …

That’s it for this update. We’ll be back to our regular fare soon.