Slashdot Mirror
Running Weblogs With Slash
dave_aiello's review:
I have been running two small-scale Slash sites since 1999. When I began developing web sites using Slash the only code available was Version 0.3, one of the first tarballs ever released by Rob Malda. That code was almost totally undocumented and not at all modular.
The Slash project has grown and the code has improved since then. Slash has now reached the point where it is a feature-laden, open source web publishing platform. However, documentation that can help new users has always been hard to come by.
I found a paragraph near the beginning of the book that I thought was important because it may help you to decide whether this book will be helpful to you:
This book is aimed at anyone interested in setting up and running a weblog with the Slash software. This includes system administrators and programmers, but attempts have been made to keep the discussion readable for people who have no desire to compile their own kernel or to rewrite the moderation system. It concentrates much more on how to accomplish things than how things work underneath, though it doesn't shy away from the greasy gears and wheels when appropriate.The authors' choice of audience might also be why you have seen comments from some experienced Slash site maintainers indicating that they weren't entirely satisfied with the finished product. That's OK -- it wasn't written for them. But, if you have a desire to build a web site running on Slash and you don't want to spend the months that it took me to read the code line-by-line, "Running Weblogs with Slash" is a good place to start.
The main part of the book begins with an overview chapter. It starts with a brief history of the Slash project. The next ten pages are a review of the user interface of Slashdot, including a number of screenshots. This is followed by three important short sections: The Slash Author Interface (administration), The Slash Publishing Cycle, and The Slash Architecture. These sections do not contain screenshots, but author interface is discussed in detail later in the book, and the publishing cycle and architecture parts have diagrams to help you visualize the concepts being discussed.
The next chapter, Installing Slash, may be the most important one of the book. This chapter is surprisingly short (about 21 pages) considering the difficulty that some people have installing the software. Two of the most critical pages of the chapter cover getting help with the key underlying software: mySQL, Perl, Apache, mod_perl, and Slash itself. All of the important URLs and mailing lists are documented here. A short outline of the installation process, and a set of step-by-step installation instructions follow. There are also short sections on building sites that are distributed across multiple machines, and running multiple virtual Slash sites on the same server.
Although the installation chapter is clearly written, some users may have difficulty completing it without a little frustration. For instance, the book says "Although many UNIX-like operating systems come with Perl already installed, building Apache with mod_perl requires the Perl source." It would help if the detailed installation section of the chapter indicated how to uninstall a binary version of Perl from at least one of the major Linux distributions. The authors have been consistent, however, in focusing this chapter on critical, Slash-specific installation issues.
The next five chapters of the book focus on Slash site administration. The topics covered include editing and updating stories, reviewing and approving submissions, comment-related functionality, moderation, and managing sections and topics. These chapters are important because most people who want to implement a Slash site have never seen the administration interface and need some help understanding the tools that are available. These chapters are also helpful to people who have experience with other web publishing systems, because a quick comparison can be done between the Slash author interface and the system with which the reader is more familiar.
The main part of the book concludes with chapters on managing a Slash-based community, basic and advanced customization, and advanced administration. The customization chapters are the only places in the main part of the book where the Perl code that makes up Slash is discussed in any detail. Now that Slash implements much of the web site's look and feel through the Template Toolkit, modification of the application source is much less important than it used to be. The advanced administration chapter is primarily about the Slash daemon (slashd), the tasks it performs (dailyStuff, moderatord, portald), and how tasks can be added and modified.
The appendices are easily the most technical part of the book. They begin with a detailed discussion of the Slash architecture, which includes several process diagrams, and a discussion of the Slash directory structure. The second appendix discusses the Slash database schema. The appendix on the Slash Template Language looks quite useful to people trying to modify the appearance of their Slash site. The Slash API appendix covers some of the important high-level functions that would be useful in building your own Slash plugin or theme. The last appendix covers Slash configuration variables, which can be important if you have to modify the location of Slash content in your file system, or you need to change other fundamental aspects of your site's configuration.
I would strongly recommend this book to you if you plan to build a Slash-based site and you want to develop a basic understanding of the Slash software as quickly as possible. You will also need to find resources (either in print or on-line) to help you understand administration of the underlying operating system, Perl, Apache, and mySQL, if you have little or no background in these subjects.
I'm sure that many people will be able to successfully install and operate Slash by using this book as their primary reference. And, if they have difficulty, they will have sufficient understanding of the architecture and terminology to ask "good questions" on the mailing lists or the Slashcode web site.
Alex McLintock's review:
Executive Summary:
This review basically lists the flaws and missing features in the book. But that doesn't mean it is a bad book - just that it is easier to find fault than praise. If you need a book on running a weblog with slash then buy this book.
About the Reviewer:
My slash experience is in running a book reviews website http://news.diversebooks.com/ using slashcode. I did set up a site years ago called "mines-a-pint.com" using a pre 1.0 version of slashcode but the site fell over due to lack of spare time.
I am also a perl programmer and web developer so I can figure out a huge variety of problems with Apache, mod_perl, and MySQL. This is lucky because slashcode depends quite greatly on the administrator having those skills. Sadly this book doesn't look into them in great detail. Were this a Wrox book the publishers would have copied a few chapters from different books - or at least given more details on how to troubleshoot those systems. The O'Reilly strategy is that you can perfectly well buy their book on MySQL, their Apache book, and their mod_perl book(s).
Choosing Slash:
I was expecting more of a comparison of Slash to other weblogs. Why chose slash over others? It is in fact a hard question to answer unless you require a site really quite like http://slashdot.org The big benefit of being able to cope with a lot of traffic probably don't apply to most sites just starting out.
The book assumes you have greater than Slash 2.2.0, but presumably quite a few people such as myself have 2.0 installed and not upgraded yet. (I don't know how many people are running pre 1.0 slash sites). It doesn't mention how you upgrade. Lets face it - even if you installed the latest version today (2.2.5) you *will* have to upgrade at some point.
Setting Up Sites:
I expected this section to be a lot more detailed than the basic instructions - but it isn't so much better. When setting up slash sites there are at least three different types of user (slash, unix, and database) and these are not differentiated properly. The authors of the book fall too easily into using slashcode jargon without realising that someone coming to this for the first time wont know the slash-speak. I understand it because I've been reading the mailing list for nearly a year. However, someone picking up this book may not have.
Most jargon terms are introduced but they could be better explained - perhaps with more diagrams. As a typical example, it took me ages to understand the difference between topics and sections. It would have been great to see examples of how different slashcode sites decided what their topics and sections would be. Originally I just saw topics and sections as being a matrix of slots into which one would pigeonhole each article. However there are some things you can do with sections (the columns of the matrix) which you can't do with the topics (the rows). This seemed to me to be an arbitrary limitation of slashcode which an installer needs to be aware of when choosing topics and sections.
More screenshots of the default theme are needed. For instance it talks about the various slashboxes which are configurable but doesn't show them.
Virtual Slash Sites:
I pretended I was a newbie at this and tried to follow their instructions for installing virtual slash sites (ie multiple weblogs on the same machine). The instructions for setting up virtual users aren't complete. EG how do you *add* a new user to DBIx::Password I figured it out because I know perl but others may have significant problems....
Slightly Unusual Config:
I wanted to see if the book would tell me how to put all slash URLs inside a directory of a pre-existing site. (eg http://mysite.com/newsdir/slashpages ) but no found info on doing this at all....
This is a shame because it means that if you wish to combine slashcode with some other html you have to take the approach of installing slash and then adding the extra html content rather than the other way around. It should have considered the situation where someone already has a pre-existing website which they just want to enhance with some news capability.
Running a Slash Site:
There is not much description of the workflow of submitted articles through the system. Instead it is explained by describing what slashcode editors (aka "Authors") do. Looking at the article workflow is important because many other organisations will have different workflows and thus will need to change their behaviour to match Slashcode and not vice versa. This is generally a "bad thing".
Would I Buy This Book?
If I were installing slash for someone and I wasn't being paid to do all the maintenance I would have no hesitation in buying this book to help whoever is doing first line support. However I don't feel a desperate need to keep the book myself since I've already learned most of what it contains just by running a slash site. I know how to read the docs, look at the perl and database, and use the mailing list.
Ok - I can't do entirely without the book because it has some useful reference sections: a full third of the book is made from Appendices and index! One of the most useful of these is the chapter on Andy Wardley's Template Toolkit. I have a bit of an advantage here since I have used Andy's code before in a different web project. However most of my future slash site design will be done by a more junior web developer who doesn't have any perl experience and I expect this will be his most used chapter. (Check back to http://news.DiverseBooks.com in a few days for his additions to this review). The final appendix is useful too -- the list of configuration variables and their meanings.
You can purchase Running Weblogs with Slash from Fatbrain. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form. (Psst! O'Reilly has also made available a 20% discount for Slashdot readers ordering by phone (800-294-4747), email (order@oreilly.com) or from the O'Reilly web site. Use discount code "#E1EW36."
The opening section is actually entitled 'First Chapter!' :)
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
About 120!! sites run on slashcode. Take a look.
sPh
(could not resist) This is selfpromotion or what... As much as I like ./ and its backend... i can't help having this view of - say - a chineese newspaper article: scientist analyses communism and finds it good.
But not from that link =3 But Here's a link that actually works. Additionally, if you want to buy it without an affiliate, here's a link over to Amazon.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Okay, so Slashcode is finally serious. I'm amused that O'Reilly has written a book about it. However, being as it powers a great deal of sites, some of them widely read/used daily, it begs one question in my mind:
Why can't Malda and the other authors make the HTML standards compliant?!?!?
In the Slashcode FAQ, Malda (or whoever maintains the FAQs has written this:
"Can you make Slash compliant with HTML x.x?"
"No, but YOU can! Slash is fully customizable. You can edit the templates to suit your taste. See the HOWTO documents for themes, plugins, and templates."
Boo. Bad answer. The Slash implementers shouldn't need to fix this when it would be a fairly trivial task to go through the Slash code and update to HTML 4.0 or XHTML 1.0 standards.
Really, I think the failure of Slash to be HTML compliant reeks of laziness in an important area. I appreciate the work Rob has done, I don't want to sound like an unfair critic, but come on, it's 2002, let's get up to some semblance of recent standards!
PHPnuke is a worthy open-source mention here, diff being it's PHP instead of Perl, is possibly a bit more user friendly, but lacks the level of security and performance that slashcode has to offer.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Now only if they could take the stability of Slashdot with all the traffic it gets hammered with and apply it to LiveJournal, a "weblog" website that has over 100K userrs, and is generally inacessible after 9pm, plagued by DNS errors and .PL file errors(?).
I was debating with a friend on the problems Slashdot and livejournal share(server load).
Well, if said book helps more people run Slash and makes it a more popular - then yes it does help the movement in an indirect way.
Postnuke, geeklog, and many other free and open source tools are for most people a much better option than slashcode. This book should have been more flexible to cover at least a couple other weblog options.
I was disappointed by it. I wanted more technical meat, but what it looks like is that the tech level would tranlate nicely to a "Slash for Dummies" level. I need at least one level deeper information, with at least a description of the perl modules and at least a once over light weight commentary of the code.
Granted that it is changing fairly quickly, but really, this is what I really need. - not something with occasional digs at pet peeves in the examples.
I consider this a beginners book, and not really at the level of a professional reference that I need. Anyone who has set up BBS's etc in the past needs more than what this book offers. It makes an OK first section with a second and third much more detailed section desperately needed. I really do not need the first volume, except for some convenient info in the appendices.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
As far as I know, Slashdot / AndOSDVerANLinux^h^h^h^h^h^hSoftware gets no special benefit by running this review besides the small amount from an affiliated link to Fatbrain.
:)) and I know one of the authors slightly in person, another even more slightly by email (so am happy to see them get their book in print), but that has nothing with whether I would post this review anyhow.
:)
Would you really prefer we not run a review of a book (still the only one as far as I or these reviewers can tell) about running Slash sites?
Obviously, I think it's good to run this (hey, I put it on the page
So, Yes -- it's convenient, because Slashdot is a site running on Slash, which is supposed to be a convenient means of disseminating and discussing just such things
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
"Running Weblogs With Slash"
I was SO stoked when I saw this headline. I mean, not only is he a guitar GOD but now he's doing web logs? Dude must have some TOTALLY killer stories about touring with Axl and all the rock babes with the big...hair.
Imagine how totally bummed I am, now that I know what the review is about. YOU LEAD ME ON, SLASHDOT DUDES! Totally non, non non, NON-HEINOUS.
I'm disappointed that O'Reilly didn't assign the goat to this line of books...
but how is it actually better? I'm running slash and I can customize every single thing... can you do that with Post Nuke? most of the nuke type sites I've ever seen have stark similarities, and reading the basic FAQ's and FMs led me to beleive that nuke is too dumbed down for someone who actually knows what they're doing. I think Slash is the best, so someone please give me ACTUAL EVIDENCE that nuke is better, and please no "it's just easier" because I don't want to hear that computer scientist-esque mumbo jumbo.
~ now you know
Man, I'm just glad the book is over so Brian Aker can work on mod_mp3 instead of slash junk all the time. When he was working on the book, it was like he stopped working on everything else. When the book was over, there was a new version of mod_mp3 just a week later. The funny part is that nobody really knows what krow does until after he does whatever he does. Like, I didn't know about any book until the week he finished it. Funny guy. Me and another mod_mp3 user setup a slashsite about mod_mp3, maybe I should actually go get the book too. However, I hear that the book isn't for perl hackers, but rather for the person who doessn't care how the internals of slashcode work. This is direct from the Author too (well Brian anyways). Krow has told me that if there were any person he could give the book to, it would be his slash using room-mate, who runs a slash site, and knows nothing of how the insides of slash work.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
there probably *will* be a book called Slash for Dummies! :)
:) (There's a good german saying which nearly applies here, I hope spelling is correct. "Alle Menschen sind Auslaender, fast ueberall" -- "All men are foreigners, nearly everywhere.")
:)
Smiley, but I'm serious. And if it's not in the For Dummies lineup, probably in one of the similar ("we're even stupider!") lines, Idiots or whichever.
And frankly, I like that idea. I think the Dummies books and similar are much kinder introductions to certain topics than the "you must be this tall to enter" typical computer book is. No one has to *stay* with the novice-level books, but novice-level is where most people start out, no matter what the subject
Sounds like you've identified a market niche that I hope someone fills -- maybe there will even be a volume II to this one.
I bet when "Running Slashsites for Encephalitics" comes out that the O'Reilly book will prove to have a more interesting writing style
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The thing that disappointed me the most about this book is the amount of space spent on the social dimensions of administering a weblog. For such a lightweight book to spend the majority of its pages on how to reduce trolls and have a coherent theme to your site, while ignoring technical questions, made it feel like a rip-off.
Particularly upsetting to me was the information on installation. The book basically repeated what's in the online documentation without adding anything. Nothing included on common problems with installation or on non-standard installs. The book was suprisingly nontechnical. It reminded me of fluff HTML books that spend all their pages on aesthetic questions and do's and don'ts of webpage design.
Expensive, short, and padded with fluff. Overall, disappointing, especially from O'reilly.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
I like slash for sites like slashdot.. but for most joe average sites, slash is somewhat overkill. I think thats why you find so many sites that look and act like slashdot using phpnuke or postnuke or some of the other slash-alike systems that are easier to install and use, and while having all the features you want and more, don't necessarily have features that don't apply to sites having less than 100,000.
I think the question on everyone's mind is whether or not it covers $rtbl banning [slashdot.org] of allegedly abusive users....
It did, but his editors modded that chapter down and then quietly removed it, and afterwards stopped payment on his advance check.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
I was over at Borders the other day buying some books and saw this. I was looking to redo my existing website (which provides weblog functionality for my friends) with some other engine. Given that my site is running on Win2K, I ended up having to use PHP-Nuke5.5 (PostNuke had some problems getting going and MyPHPNuke was missing some features I wanted). Anyway, this book has absolutely no information (that I could find) on getting things running on Windows. I don't know if this can be done, but don't go looking to this book for help.
A few months ago, I undertook a single-man campaign to get Slash up and running so I could help realize a goal I and a few friends had together -- a goal that was conceived long before "blog" was a household term. Before "E/N" was a common site format, even.
;)
So I broke down, bought O'Reilly's MySQL/mSQL book, got the Slash code, installed all the various bits and pieces. I was struck almost immediately by the profound lack of decent, in-depth information. Not knowing PERL, and not being a SQL wizard, there were many places where I had to put everything aside and go do something else for a few hours.
As my girlfriend was gone for the week, I was able to pretty much devote every waking minute to getting this thing up and running.
I don't remember how long it took me to get everything in place. Two full days, at least -- and by "full," I mean morning-to-morning shifts of hacking, tweaking, install, uninstalling, praying, urinating on various altars, etc.
In any case, eventually everything was up and running. I should note here that the fastest machine I personally own is a 233mHz with a bit more than 128 MB of RAM; I was trying to run this thing off a p166 with 72 MB of RAM. It seemed sensible at the time, since Linux, when properly tuned, can work wonders. Plus, the site was meant to be fairly low-traffic, at least at first.
Well, ha-ha.
This thing was dog-slow. With all the PERL munging and SQL queries running on the same box, even just me using it from a different machine was roughly as enjoyable as beating myself in my own damn face with a small but dense brick.
Enter PHPNuke, circa version 5.1. The reason you hear people report over and over "it's a ten-minute install" is because, well, it is. Add an hour or so for exploration, bug-checking, tweaking, maybe a day if you want to really cook up a nice theme, and that's pretty much it. Additionally, it's extremely fast on my old hardware.
Granted: PHPNUke doesn't offer Slash's myriad of configuration and control options -- but then, for me, finding documentation for those options was itself an adventure. On the other hand, PHPNuke's documentation and support resources are many and varied, and almost all in French or some other god-awful thing for an American to see at 3:15 AM when something is suddenly mysteriously breaking. However, there are various IRC channels (which are a bit less populated than #slash, to be honest) wherein one may find helpful folks who run a roughly 1 in 10 chance of speaking a language you do. The installed userbase is large enough that any bug you may encounter is almost certain to be reported elsewhere, possibly with a fix already in the works.
The upshot: PHPNuke saved the day! Slash is cool, but, in my opinion, only for those of you who have a serious userbase and plenty of hardware budget.
The site I and my friends eventually got running -- Megarad.com -- is now running PHPNuke 5.4. Apart from a few hiccoughs here and there with upgrades (not to mention the deplorable operating practices and customer service standard of our hoster), things have been very good indeed.
Personal me, collaborative you
...but a bit daunting to setup for the first-time user (MySQL could have something to do with it...)
I just put together a personal weblog at home with Movable Type, and it was a breeze to set up. (Note: visitors are welcome, but right now there's not much on the site, and what is there is in french, mostly).
Of course, Movable Type is not as feature-rich as Slashcode (pretty hard to beat in that category), so it's not for everyone. But for a simple, perl-based personal weblog, it's quite alright.
Reminder: find a new sig
Full disclosure: Although not "officially" associated with YAWNS, I've contributed some code to the project and plan to contribute more.
Shayne
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube
You should use that second sentence as your sig. Much better than your current sig :).
I like it, I like it a lot! Much more powerful now. I hope you don't get chopped down by the editors. I think you'll be ok but what the f* do I know :).
Wow.. I didn't know they did blacklisting. In all truth it doesn't seem like you're missing much these days with what /. is now. I can understand how it would be annoying to be unjustly blacklisted.
Gods, I knew this day would come.
- help. A FAQ was written: http://www.zevils.com/programs/files/slash-faq2.tx t. Patches were given to Mr. Malda, who promptly either ignored or failed to acknowledge them. Pleas were made for Malda to link the list or FAQ to the slashcode page. They went unheeded. People who had spent months unsucccessfully trying to make Slash work discovered the FAQ, mailing list, and patch, and managed to make slash work. And *they* were unhappy that Malda and /. blew us off and refused to point to us as a help source.
/. and then we got to be insulted later by the appearance of a 0.9 release without any acknowledgement of our effort, followed by the appearance of slashcode.com, and now finally there's a nice book about it posted on /. itself, which kicks money back to /. not to mention the authors of the book whom are likely largely ignorant of the early history of /.
/. and the book authors etc. about these issues. Or perhaps I ought to buy one share of stock and ask at the stockholder's meeting! Yeah, that's it, they gotta answer to the stockholders...
See, once upon a time, back in the ancient days, before the existance of slashcode.com, there was a group of people who attempted to use the 0.2 and 0.3 releases of Slash.
This was BEFORE the Andover acquisition, before the IPO, before the VAOLinux assimilation.
Someone managed to a) make slash 0.3pre work b) provide a patch to do so, and c) PROVIDE DOCUMENTATION.
A list sprung up for those of us interested.
http://projects.is.asu.edu/mailman/listinfo/slash
I'm really p*ssed off here. OUR work was blown off by Malda and never ever acknowledged on
Yeah, I'm real bitter that all this isn't even a footnote in history. I think though that a) there should be credit given where it is due and b) the truth should be made public about what Malda was up to with slash at the time ("slash was made public as a joke as an entry for obfuscated perl contest and we will never support it" IIRC yet he through Andover/VAOLinux did later).
So come on, let's see if we get some acknowledgement from
Email: (slash) [at] (underwaterbasketweaving [dot] (com)
- Solaris 2.7
- Netscape Enterprise Server 3.6
- Sybase 11.9.2
Don't try that at home.... One day soon our sites will make the jump to the current distro.The leaders of the Slash project have always made me feel at home. I help out answering technical and non-technical questions whenever I can. And, both of our sites have been listed in the YASS list, despite the fact that they are not derived from the current distro. We're all in this together.
-- Dave Aiello
Actually, when I suggest there probably would be a dummies book, I mean one meant for "end users" (the same way there are books for AOL users on how to use all the features of AOL) with "end users" being anyone who isn't actually involved with installing or maintaining the backend of the site, but who (like me) has access to the web-interface as user or author. There are a lot of people who could be putting their company's bulletin board on Slash (or, as you mention one of the many similar systems) who don't need to know / use much Deep Magic.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The site I'm running is hosted by SlashHosting, and they use slash 1.0.9 or something like that. If you go to www.slashcode.com you'll see what it looks like approximately. It 1.0.9 doesn't use the template toolkit, yet I can still do whatever I want with it. True, my site does look a lot like Slashdot, and that's no mistake. I like the way slashdot looks and so I modeled my site after it. The slogan is lame, I know, and we're trying to think of a new one, but until then we're just being unoriginal, OK? Otherwise, if you knew the inner workings of slash, you would understand all of the customizations that are present on my site.
~ now you know
Sounds great to me! Anything that helps get the job done.
Bush's education improvements were
chromatic, I haven't read the book yet, but I get the impression that what I really need is the second edition.
The history of computing, it seems to me, is everyone spending hundreds of hours puzzling over things that are poorly explained.
Anyhow, I expect that the book is a big improvement over what was available before, which was very little.
I'm very, very impressed with Slashdot. I'd like to set up a Slashcode site, but am trying to avoid the many hours of frustration that is usual for something like this. A book that was extremely complete would be worth at least $200 to me.
Bush's education improvements were
I will definitely have a look at the book, probably tomorrow.
A lot of the comments on Slashdot are from people on a very limited budget. For people who have money, there is an equivalence of money and time. A book that saves me 10 hours is easily worth $100.
What normally happens, however, is that the books are of very, very poor quality. Often I can extract all the information useful to me in an entire book while standing in the bookstore. I once did a survey of perhaps 15 books on Samba and concluded that none of them were complete or well-written.
When things are working well, the author does as much of the work as possible to make a subject as easy as possible for the readers. This is more work than most people or editors want to do. The result is that, instead of one great book on a subject, there are 15 (as in the case of Samba), and all are of poor quality, and no one makes much money.
If you do make a second edition, I would be glad to give some free time to helping with editing.
Since I haven't seen your book, this cannot possibly be a comment about it. But, in general, I have been amazed at the uniformly low quality of O'Reilly books. Something is better than nothing. But, the O'Reilly books I've seen are, in my opinion, only slightly better than rough drafts of outlines to write a real book. The O'Reilly company doesn't seem to have anyone who understands editing. Or, maybe the editors find that the writers just don't want to do the work.
Slashdot, and Slashcode, performed very well distributing news of the September 11 bombing. It was the best balanced news source I could find. So, the subject is important.
Bush's education improvements were