How I Wrote My Book

Basically, we use Markdeep (https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/), a _very_ powerful Markdown implementation with a bunch of built-in features. The killer feature is that with a handful of boilerplate lines (UTF-8 declaration at the top, and JavaScript loader at the bottom), you get content that automatically self-transforms in the browser into a full HTML document. This eliminates any build step, and means you can treat it as you would any other HTML file, with optional CSS and other features. It also bundles in a LaTeX engine, ASCII diagram rendering, and a whole host of other features. If you look at the three ray tracing books, you can see how simple the source is, and how pleasing the final rendering.

Check out the books and the GitHub repo — it's a _great_ way to quickly and easily pound out a web book.

Then I had so many dependencies that I didn't want to update my computer anymore as it could break my build process and the Makefile which did everything from taking the .tex files, to image processing, to PDF generation and cover art integration. So I moved everything into a virtual machine. I still keep it around but I am too afraid to boot it nowadays. Would be pwnd in a second after years of no updates :)

Next time I write a book it'll be likely non-technical and then markdown should be fine.

My book was about IPv6 and since it is no longer up to date I stopped selling it. It's available at https://danrl.com/ipv6 (Book language is German, though)

Instead of outright saying “I wrote a book, you should buy it!”, you generate some form of meta-content revolving around your book, that ideally fits the kind of content that would be appreciated by the people on whatever platform you’re doing the promotion on.

Admittedly this ain’t exactly rocket science and in this specific case the actual agenda is so obvious as to make ones eye roll but it does make you wonder about other more subtle techniques being applied.

And very quickly this can lead to a form of existential crisis where you wonder if anything you see, even say on hn, has any actual value or maybe its all just people finding ways to hijack and abuse basic human neural mechanisms in order to generate revenue off of others.

And then you wonder, what does that make them? If these people and what they do are solely defined by what others find “interesting”, or by what can be profitable - what does that mean about who they are? Like, they are essentially non-entities, with no real human substance to them: they are the descriptions of our worst tendencies and reflections of economic mechanisms. I think this is called “soulless”.

Maybe I should write a post about how I wrote this post. Like subscribe and leave a comment :)