making an ePub

I've wanted to make artist books for a while and make them available for people to download from my art blog. I'm also not incredibly keen on PDFs, I'm not sure why, I'm just not. So when I found out that you can make ePubs and people can download them to their iPhones, and reading devices, and what not, I thought "Hooray!".

So in my first step I made a test book using the export to ePub function in Pages, and that worked, and then I made a second book but that one came out a little bit wonky, basically because the word processing program started to put in extra formatting.

Then I found out that you can make ePubs yourself using XML, CSS and XHTML. This sounds very sensible and good to me because it means that I am putting in the formatting rather than letting a machine do it. So my next step is to do this tutorial Build a digital book with EPUB. I will see how I go.

Purpose, or Why Have I Started Another Blog

One of my goals for this year, and perhaps the next 10 years, is to learn to program. I've been poking around the edges of this for a long time, learning a bit of HTML and CSS, learning a tiny bit of Javascript, Java and Ruby. Then last year I bought an iPad and started using apps and I thought I want to make an app, how hard can it be? And found out that the answer to that is Very hard.

So, I've decided to revise my HTML and CSS and learn about HTML5 in the process, you know, start with the kind of simple stuff first, what I'm confident with.

At the same time I've been looking at the School of Webcraft and saw that there was a course called Javascript 101 and thought that it might be interesting to follow along behind the people who are enrolled in the course. And one of their tasks was to write stuff in a blog about how they were finding their learning, so I thought, of course! let's start another blog about all of MY learning! And I can apply the HTML stuff to this blogger blog, and hopefully in the end, I'll come out a better person and a competent user of the web.