Spring Conferences Galore!

Busy month ahead, with much to say and much to learn. This time of year is usually when I can go to professional conferences, but I seem much more involved with organizing them this year. In particular, I’m talking about (and at, truth be told) these two, separated by just two weeks!

Flag of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Saturday, May 19: WriteCamp Milwaukee 4

This “traditional un-conference” (if there can be such a thing) is for everyone who writes: Fiction, nonfiction, with multiple books and/or bylines or just a blog or a novel cooking in the word processor that no one’s ever seen. No matter what sort of writing project you’re interested in doing, there’s a place for you at WriteCamp.

What’s traditional about this un-conference? Well, the biggest thing is that there’s no set schedule. You’ll come in to the Hide House in beautiful Bay View, in the southeast corner of Milwaukee and encounter a blank wall with time slots and rooms demarcated with tape. Want to lead a session about something? Take a Post-It note and slap the topic in one of the blank slots. You’re in! Of course, some of us have posted some ideas for sessions on the website already. You can add some there too. There are no guarantees that any of them will be presented–but if you post a comment on the ones you want to see, the people with the idea will be impressed (believe me!).

I have learned more than a little at previous WriteCamps, mostly about social media and freelance practices. I’ve led sessions on the future of journalism and held WordPress clinics. This year, I’m planning sessions on getting into technical communication and “WordPress for Writers.”

The other traditionally unconference-y thing that WriteCamp Milwaukee adheres to is that it is free to attend (though if you’re in Milwaukee tonight, April 26, check out the comedy benefit at Stonefly Brewery!), and you get lunch, a mid-day poetry slam demonstration, and a tote bag with assorted goodies besides the education.

WordCamp Milwaukee 2012

Things are really heating up for the first ever WordCamp in Milwaukee, set for the first weekend in June, and that’s terrific!

We have a spectacular lineup of speakers  for both the User track and the Developer track. These WordPress gurus are mostly from the Greater Milwaukee area and from that city of big shoulders a little south of here. You even get two authors of WordPress books: I’ll be the one standing in Lisa Sabin-Wilson‘s shadow.

What am I talking about? All about the amount of help any WordPress user can get just by kicking around the WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites.

There’s an un-conference track, where people will be running informal sessions on topics yet to be determined (and yes, you can get in on that too). And we’re working hard to staff the Happiness Bar for the full conference. This is where users and developers can get answers to their particular problems.

We’re working on some fun stuff too, but it’s not ready to unveil yet.

Unlike WriteCamp, WordCamp Milwaukee costs, though not much (just $20). Buy your ticket before May Day to guarantee your commemorative t-shirt.

All this activity is forcing me to miss the annual Technical Communication Summit sponsored by the Society for Technical Communication in Rosemont, Illinois. But you can follow news from the summit via my pals at TechWhirl.com.

Hope to see you at one of these swell gigs!

Somewhat Shameless Self-Promotion: WordPress in Depth

Image via Wikipedia

We’re not especially into the hype and commercialism that often slips into the blogosphere. At Notes from the Metaverse, the goal is to empower ordinary folks to use technology to find their voice and get things done. I hope this blog helps you navigate the occasionally treacherous waters of open source technology, especially desktop Linux and WordPress. I firmly believe that good content is the most important SEO tool there is.

That said, if you happen to know someone who is thinking about starting a blog in 2012, or wants to take advantage of all WordPress has to offer, you could do a lot worse than picking up a copy of WordPress in Depth.

I have to say that I’ve been amazed and humbled at some of the reviews for the second edition that have appeared at Amazon.com. Indulge me for a minute while I show you some of the quotes that warm my heart (even if the spelling isn’t always perfect):

It is well-written for people like me who know there way around a computer but don’t consider themselves too technical.  –Michael Gallagher

This book WordPress in Depth, is easy to understand even when talking about the professional side of WordPress. –S. Nichols

Some manuals have the detail but not the clarity required to be user friendly. This one delivers the information in a clear manner and is well organized. It describes putting up a WordPress blog in a chronological manner that would allow the reader to sit down at the computer with the manual and just work their way through the process.  –Lou Belcher

I was very happy to receive this book because I am interested in starting a blog and I have absolutely ZERO experience with WordPress and very limited experience with any kind of programming at all, but I am pretty good at following “recipes.” To push the analogy, WordPress In Depth (2nd Edition) not only gives you the recipes, but teaches you how the various ingredients chemically react to one another to produce a result. Some chefs want to know that stuff; others just want the cake to come out right. This book is for the former.   –S. Rudge

Bud Smith and I worked hard to make the new edition more “in depth,” yet still friendly to the rank beginner. Admittedly, not everyone agrees that we succeeded.

Thanks to the inevitable lag in publishing schedules, the book doesn’t cover some of the newer embellishments in WordPress, but watch this space for help on that score soon. If there’s something in particular you want to know about, please leave a comment here.

You can find WordPress in Depth wherever you find quality computer books (and I know that’s harder than it used to be), be it in your town or at your computer. It comes in paper and electronic versions.

As the pitchman always says: If you liked either edition of WordPress in Depth, tell a friend. If not, tell me, in the Comments. Ideas for future editions are greatly appreciated too. What have you had trouble learning in WordPress? What features excite you most?

While you’re still in the book shopping mood, you might also want to check out these recent releases:

• Bud Smith, my outstanding collaborator, never stops writing. He’s got Using iPad 2 out now.
• Rochelle Melander, the WriteNow Coach, inspires writers in Milwaukee and elsewhere with her blog and workshops. She’s also a friend of WriteCamp Milwaukee, which makes her a all-round terrific person. Her latest, Write-a-Thon,  is something I’ve been meaning to get since before it came out, but I procrastinate.

And so concludes our marketing interlude. I’ll return to helpful content sooner than you think!

Whatever holiday you celebrate this time of year, I hope it’s a good one! And may 2012 be the best ever!

Another Transition: Linux Journal Goes All-Digital

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The word went out Friday: the 208th monthly edition of Linux Journal would be the last of its kind in print. Starting immediately, the magazine would no longer be printed and delivered to newsstands and subscribers. Instead, a plain PDF or enhanced PDF from a company called Texterity will be delivered to subscribers.

Doc Searls described the reasons for the switch thusly in the article linked above:

Just this month, ABC reported that newsstand magazine sales fell 9% in the first six months of this year. The Wall Street Journal reported a drop of 9.2% for consumer magazines, with double-digit drops for celebrity weeklies like People andStar. Women’s Wear Daily reported similar drops for all but one fashion magazine: Vogue, thanks to one Lady Gaga cover.

The big computer-industry trade magazines from the ’90s have either disappeared or gone digital. Of the big three publishers, only IDG is still intact, but relatively few of its old magazines are still in print.

We survived while others failed by getting lean and staying focused. But the costs of printing and distributing continue to go up. We could keep publishing in print if we could raise the number of advertiser pages, but we don’t see that happening.

So, after a fashion, you can see the writing on the wall. The backlash against the decision can be seen in the comment stream. These ranged from the likes of (not actual quotes) “Well, duh, this was inevitable. You gotta get used to it” to pleas for the ability to read the magazine while camping.

One of the more thoughtful critics wondered whether historians and archaeologists of the future might believe humans of our age lost the ability to write, given the lack of tangible artifacts. I suspect there’s a good sci-fi story in that idea; wish I had the imagination to write it.

Now I’ll admit that I lean more toward the side that says “isn’t a printed computer magazine something of an anachronism these days?” But I’ll also admit that I don’t really make time to read all the electronic publications I subscribe to. I find it a little hard to make time for the print publications I subscribe to as well.

I do think that we will eventually everyone will be going all-digital, and probably sooner rather than later. As some folks in the LJ comment thread noted, it’s important to do it right, though. I hope that as this transition proceeds, we can all find the right form(s) for our information.

As a writer, I also hope that LJ remains a paying market for the people who provide the content we all read. To that end, I intend to keep my subscription for as long as possible, and recommend you do that too. I’d give ‘em a raise too, but that’s just me. Disclaimer: I sold a story to the website (not the print version) a few years ago, and hope to do so again one day.

Do you read Linux Journal? Other Linux-oriented print publications? Do you read electronic magazines of any kind? Are print magazines on the way out, and is that a good thing? Just a few of the many questions raised by this decision; feel free to comment here on any or all of them.

Related articles

• The end of Linux Journal (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com)
• Linux Journal Goes – Surprise! – Digital (news.slashdot.org)

Conference Season 2011

Spring is here and it’s time to get educated. Yes, I suspect that a lot of you reading this are still in school, and aching for the days when you won’t be sitting in a room being educated. Tragically, I have to tell you that once you get out in the Real World, you really begin to relish the few chances to get together with colleagues, perhaps in a strange city, and learn new things. That’s what I’m doing now.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be attending (or keeping watch on) these great events. For most of these, you’re more than welcome to join me:

Society for Technical Communication Summit
Dates: May 15-18, 2011
Location: Sacramento, CA Convention Center
URL: http://summit.stc.org/
Twitter Hashtag: #stc11

This is the annual conference of my professional organization, and my employer is sending me so I can be a better tech writer. As a bonus, I get to see possibly the most famous technical communicator in the world. Tim O’Reilly is our keynoter Sunday night, and while you may know him as the god of technical publishing, I just learned from this interview at South By Southwest that the publishing business started during a slack time in his tech writing consultant business. There’s much more of interest in that hour-long podcast, but I’m really looking forward to hearing him.

This will be my second STC conference, and the last one was quite useful. I’m confident it’ll be another good experience.

WriteCamp Milwaukee 3
Date: June 4, 2011
Location: Hide House, Milwaukee, WI
URL: http://www.writecampmilwaukee.com
Hashtag: #writecamp

This local gathering/unconference of writers of all genres is a great opportunity to break out of the isolation of the Writer’s Life, see what other people are doing, and learn something new. It’s the brainchild of my friend Boone Dryden.

I’ve proposed two WordPress-related sessions. I’ll give one or both, depending on interest.

• Publish Every Day: Honing Your Craft Through Blogging
• Building a Professional Writer’s Website with WordPress

In any case, it should be great fun and always interesting.

Open Help Conference
Date: June 3-5, 2011
Location: University of Cincinnati, OH
URL: http://openhelpconference.com/index.html
Hashtag: ??

I wish I could get out of town to attend this gathering of documentation teams for various open source products, but I’ll try to follow this online.

Folks from Ubuntu Linux, the GNOME project, FLOSS Manuals (I’ve also written about my experiences with FLOSS Manuals here) and Mozilla will be there. One of my favorite tech-book authors, Anne Gentle, will also be talking about community building.

WordCamp Chicago
Date: July 30-31, 2011
Location: DePaul University, Chicago, IL
URL: http://2011.chicago.wordcamp.org/
Hashtag: #WCChicago

One of a zillion WordCamps that happen every year, where people spend a weekend talking about WordPress. Someday we want to have one in Milwaukee, but this isn’t too far away. They’re pulling together a program as we speak, and nobody knows yet who will appear. I’m hoping it’ll be great!

Meanwhile, the second Milwaukee WordPress Meetup is in the works, for sometime in June. More info to come on that!

So whether you can make any of the above events (and I’d love to see you), do try to find like minds this spring and summer, and don’t put your brain entirely on hold.

Do you have a favorite conference? Hate one or more of the above events? A preference for one or another WriteCamp session? Other spring-like thoughts? Share them in the Comments window.

In Praise of Understated Themes

Been visiting a lot of WordPress sites lately—an occupational hazard of the beat. I have to admit I’m moderately astonished at how many WP bloggers choose gaudy themes that scream for attention to the design, often at the expense of the content.

I don’t want to point fingers, but you know the symptoms of the type:

• Gigantic heading fonts
• In-your-face bright colors
• Flashing ads that seem like the modern equivalent of blink tags

Now often there is good information contained on these sites, but sometimes you wonder whether the design is really serving the content, or the content is there to bring attention to the pictures (or more precisely, the ads).

Now of course one great thing about blogging is Attracting Attention to Yourself. If we just wanted a diary to keep our thoughts together, we’d probably just buy a blank book and put pen to paper, or get some use out of our favorite word processor. No, we want to have (crave, even) readers. And the experts tell us posts should be brief (I think mine have gotten shorter over the years) to accommodate short attention spans. But the big fonts and graphics that seem to overwhelm all else … underwhelm me.

Notes from the Metaverse has had approximately two themes since moving to WordPress.com some years ago, and I think I changed the header image in the current theme (Regulus, a really old theme from Ben Gillbanks) once. I really like that there’s not much to the theme besides that header image.  This allows you to focus on the content. I’m a little flashier with the colors over at the other site with Caribou, from James R Whitehead at Spectacu.la, but I’m playing with a new one, The Erudite, from Matt Wiebe that seems to be more like me.

One of the other great things about blogging is that you get the opportunity to improve your writing skills by “publishing every day” (or at least every week or two). So take advantage of that opportunity. Don’t be tempted to devalue your writing or information-gathering skills by grabbing that ostentatious theme. Let your content shine, and the readers will come.

Welcome LibreOffice!

It’s been more than a week now since the Great OpenOffice Fork of 2010, and the dust is beginning to settle.

If you haven’t heard, last Monday a large chunk of the  OpenOffice.org (OOo) development community announced the formation of The Document Foundation (TDF), and would create a new office suite based on OOo, called LibreOffice. The announcement carried endorsements from many heavy hitters in the open source and corporate worlds, including Google, Novell, Red Hat, and Canonical. Even the GNOME Foundation (while noting the existence of its own small suite) had nice things to say at the launch.

Absent from the party were a pair of giants: IBM and Oracle. The latter was not surprising, as the database company put this train in motion by acquiring Sun Microsystems, the firm who had released OpenOffice into the wild some years back. TDF invited Oracle to participate in the effort, and expressed hope they would release the copyrights to the OpenOffice name. Yep, that was going to happen. Monday, Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols reported that Oracle has officially declined to participate in the Foundation.

With more than 100 million users, we believe OpenOffice.org is the most advanced, most feature-rich open-source implementation and will strongly encourage the OpenOffice community to continue to contribute through www.openoffice.org.

Today, Italo Vignoli of TDF reports, among many interesting numbers, that the LibreOffice beta has been downloaded some 80,000 times in its first week of existence. The beta consists of rebranded OpenOffice v3.3 code. There’s a support forum for those users now running too.

Here’s a sample of some of the best reporting and thinking I saw, outside of the mainstream tech press, on the announcement:

• UNIXMen
• Asa Dotzler of Mozilla
• Lodahl
• Free Software Universe

Now comes the fallout, as the rest of the OpenOffice community has to pick sides. Eric Bachard of the OOo Education project initially posted a skeptical article called “No LibreOffice for Me” to his blog, but apparently pulled it in the intervening time. Jean Hollis Weber of the Documentation Project (close to my heart, of course) wondered about the future: “At this point I’m not quite sure what this will mean for my role as Co-Lead of the OpenOffice.org Documentation Project, given my enthusiasm for the Foundation.”

While most of the coverage and blogging about LibreOffice and TDF was quite positive, Matt Asay of Canonical expressed a dissent that I saw a lot of in roaming around online in his essay for GigaOm: “LibreOffice: An Idea Whose Time Has Come (and Gone).”

It’s unclear what a web-light, client-heavy Microsoft Office clone can hope to achieve in terms of real innovation. And why are we worried about replicating Microsoft Office functionality, which has long been the aim of the OpenOffice community? While some Excel spreadsheet jocks may live in Microsoft Office, very few of the rest of us give it more than a cursory glance on a regular basis. It’s not that we’re not engaged in “office productivity,” either. We just work differently now.

While I don’t begrudge Asay’s ability to work with Google Docs and Zoho in his day job, I can tell you that there are millions of us still using word processors and the like installed on a desktop, safely behind a corporate firewall. Maybe that will change over time, but for now, I’d much prefer using LibreOffice than that other dominant suite.

I wish the LibreOffice team the best of luck building their new suite, and devising many new and effective ways of communicating. Keeping KOffice on their toes as well!

As we watch this community grow, I hope the openSUSE community can learn some lessons as well. One thought from this corner: Suddenly the idea of an independent foundation to manage the community doesn’t sound so out in left field. With the openSUSE Conference coming up, there’s a lot to discuss.

WriteCamp2: A Stimulating and Energizing Day

Had a marvelous time at WriteCamp Milwaukee 2 Saturday.

Mercy Hill Church at the Hide House is a fantastic venue, which you can see for yourself in the Flickr feed. The space was broken up into five session areas: Two in the main “sanctuary” area, with plenty of separation, so no one got confused by audio bleedthrough; three smaller classrooms.

The whole conference had a pretty analog feel to it for this techie. I brought my laptop, and lugged it around unopened pretty much all day. I confined my notes to pen and paper.

Sessions were 45 minutes long, with 15 minutes in between to move around. Usually enough time to take another look at the board and pick another location. Take a look at the full schedule. This review will of necessity take up only the sessions I could attend.

Morning Sessions

First session was with Daniel Goldin of Boswell Books. While mostly focused on fiction, he had great stories about the business of book selling. Best factoid, only peripherally writing-related: you  know how mass-market paperbacks used to be all the same size, around 6″ x 5″? As the reading population has aged, publishers made the paperbacks a little bit taller, so the font could be bigger!

Next up, I went to my only foray into the fiction realm, a session called “Reading as a Writer” hosted by Chris (whose last name I never did get — sorry!), an English prof at Columbia College in Chicago. He brought readings from three short stories (Gogol’s “The Nose,” John McNally’s “The Vomitorium” and something from Katherine Anne Porter). He would pick random people in the crowd to read a page or so aloud, and then we’d discuss the memorable bits of material on the page. Chris emphasized that simply by noting what stands out in a reading will improve our own writing. For fiction writers, the lesson was not to get all hung up on the symbolism and the Great Message behind a story (at least not at first). Just concentrate on the details that pull you into a story and make a story memorable. Good lessons for nonfiction writers too.

Todd Sattersten of 100 Best Business Books of All Time fame led another business-and-marketing session with perhaps the best title of the day: “Venture Capital, Viruses and Versioning: Three Things Every (Book) Author Needs to Know.” Do I need to tell you he knows a bit about marketing? This was the most satisfying session I attended.

The Venture Capital part of this talk is a reminder that publishers are really good for just two basic components of book marketing: Distribution (getting your book into bookstores) and Media Connections (getting media attention for your title). Authors are responsible for connecting with readers. As one publisher explains: “I can’t sell a copy to your mother.” The venture capital analogy works like this: Venture capital for a startup is (when it’s good) about giving your business a chance to succeed. After that, it’s up to you.  As an author, if you’re not conscious of this reality, chances are your title won’t sell, and maybe you don’t get a second chance.

Once you have the idea firmly implanted that it’s your job to market your book effectively, you want to do everything you can to create a buzz around it. Today, that’s often about making your book and its idea(s) viral. Recommending Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick, Todd explained the six basic elements of an idea that sticks: It’s Simple, Unexpected and interesting, concrete, tells a story, and is credible.

The last part of the session was about versioning: Make your content/idea available in as many ways as possible. Find your audience, and let your audience find you. One example: Someone apparently turned a chapter of her novel into a PowerPoint presentation. Building an audience through a blog on the topic. Always put your audience first.

Lunch and Afterwards

The lunch break featured a Slam Poetry demo by members of the Milwaukee slam team preparing to contest for a national title this summer in Minneapolis. You’d also find me feverishly preparing for my session(s).

We had an excellent discussion about “The Death and Life of American Journalism,” based on the book of that title by John Nichols and Bob McChesney. The discussion was greatly enhanced by the presence of Ricardo Pimentel, who runs the editorial page at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He was willing to offer some on-the-ground perspective on the state of the newspaper business. Unfortunately, time ran out just as we were getting into a rather spirited discussion of coverage of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I do think it was a worthwhile conversation.

After running my own session, it was nice to decompress in a smaller session about real-life networking dos and don’ts.

After the networking session, I had a great conversation with Karen Ford, Internal Organizing Vice President of the National Writers Union. She came up from Chicago to see what this WriteCamp thing was all about. We may have more to announce at some point down the road.

At the end of the day, I opened myself up for questions about WordPress. This session was lightly attended, but lots of fun (presumably all the real WordPress geeks were at WordCampChicago). We worked to solve a problem where  commenters weren’t getting notified when someone responded to them. Someone else was interested in the differences between WordPress blogging and wikis. I also talked about some strategies to get more readers.

All in all, a great day! I’m really looking forward to next year. I’m also hoping there’s a way to keep WordCampChicago from conflicting! Reports from that conference sounded great too.

Update: CiviCRM Manual Launched!

The CiviCRM manual is now complete, and available at FLOSS Manuals.

Here’s the news release, emphasizing the … shall we say “unusual”? … reality that the documentation is released BEFORE the software itself. With user docs often an afterthought in open source development communities, it’s great that the CiviCRM team really put a great deal of energy into the documentation, as well as the code.

Most of the book was written over a long weekend, described here (by me) and here (by the CiviCRM team). It was great fun, and I hope to contribute again soon.

Six Days Till WriteCamp2 in Milwaukee!

Hey folks, there’s still time to make plans to attend WriteCamp2 in Milwaukee next weekend! This camp is for you if your interests lie toward the written (or typed) word. Bloggers, poets, journalists, business and technical writers, fiction and nonfiction writers – we want to see you! Any other writers, and would-be writers I left out – yes, you too!

You can read about what I’m doing at WriteCamp at my other site. In brief, I’ll be leading a discussion about the future of American journalism, and doing something related to WordPress. I’ll have copies of WordPress in Depth on hand, and a pen to sign them with. I’ll also be at the pre-party Friday night, having some fun.

But WriteCamp is not entirely about the published and famous laying out the One True Path to publishing fame, because there isn’t any such thing. WriteCamp is about every participant sharing their passion and knowledge about whatever writing-related topic strikes them.

Hope to see you in my hometown!

Rockin’ FLOSS Manuals: The CiviCRM book sprint

If you use open source software, and aren’t a programmer, you may wonder how you can give back to the community that provides you with such marvelous tools at no-to-little cost.  At the same time, maybe you’ve run into a problem running some piece of open source software, clicked F1 or otherwise looked for some help in doing something—and found little or no help on offer. There’s a way to solve both these problems: Check out, and get involved with, the FLOSS Manuals project.

Recently I’ve made the time to participate in one of the more fun institutions of the FLOSS Manuals project: the Book Sprint. Programmers of all stripes know about sprints, the Agile technique of defining a set period of time when some new software gets finished. In the open source world, sprints are times where usually far-flung volunteer development teams gather in some specific place for a long weekend for a coding intensive session. New versions don’t necessarily come out of the sprint, but usually it moves a lot closer to “done.” FLOSS Manual book sprints bring writers (and often, programmers) together aiming to finish a manual, new or updated. Occasionally new manuals are even created from nothing in a weekend. The best part is that you don’t always have to get on an airplane to participate. Remote folks are welcome!

Our task for the last weekend in April was to complete a major updating of the CiviCRM user guide. This web application designed as a Drupal module, and now also a  Joomla! extension, is built like a customer relationship manager (hence the CRM) for nonprofits and political organizations. This makes it more like a community organizer’s best friend.

Counting FLOSS Manuals founder Adam Hyde, and O’Reilly editor Andy Oram, there were about a half-dozen participants gathered somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area and two remote copy editors: Me in Milwaukee, and Helen in New Zealand. The writers were busy all day Saturday, and delivered the first chapters to the copy editors late Sunday. Throughout the sprint, a chat stream kept everyone together to get questions answered and occasionally engage in the usual banter. You could access the chat both from a standard IRC client and directly from the Sprint page at FLOSS Manuals. Other communication took place on the FLOSS Manuals standard discussion list, which you can sign up for here.

The editing took place directly on the FLOSS Manuals site, with the standard visual editor (TinyMCE?) Checking out chapters for editing, and checking in edited material was quite simple. If you’ve ever used a tool like Google Docs (or the WordPress visual editor), you can handle this. It may not be overly complicated, but it works very well.

On Tuesday, the sprint ended, and the revision was formally released. But the copy editing continues, and I should be getting back to it!

Seriously, this project is for you if you fit any or all of these characteristics:

• You are passionate about open source software
• You like describing how software works to others
• You want to see if technical writing/communication might be an appropriate career move, but don’t know how to get experience
• You like hanging out with geeks and/or writers, either in Real Life or virtually

Hope to see some of you over at FLOSS Manuals soon! Look over the projects, and if you see something you’d like to help with, register and have at it. If you want to write about a particular open source project that isn’t listed here, mention it on the mailing list and you can organize your own sprint!

For another perspective on the sprint, visit the CiviCRM Blog posts on the sprint.