In an attempt to improve my writing abilities, I’ve been reading several writing books. The one recommended to me the most was “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser. The book is great, but something struck me early on that I wanted to share.

It’s long overdue, but I finally got around to redesigning and re-launching this site. There haven’t been any updates in nearly five months, but that is coming to an end.

One of the best things about Twitter is seeing what stuff the people I follow recommend or promote. Given most of us are in the same industry, it only makes sense that I take a look and see if a particular book, blog post, or screencast can be useful to me. I’ve seen several people over the past couple of weeks tweeting/re-tweeting about this “Steal Like An Artist” book by Austin Kleon. I took a quick look at it on Amazon, but wasn’t quite sure if it would be very beneficial to someone like me. However, the reviews were excellent and it was only 8 dollars (for either Kindle or Paperback edition), so I said what the hell and purchased it anyway.

It might sound surprising, but I never actually learned HTML. I remember purchasing a book on HTML back in high school, but I never did finish it. Over the years I picked up a bit of HTML or CSS here and there, but still never really knew it. I’ve found myself doing a lot more plain HTML & CSS recently, especially due to the powerful changes in HTML5, so I figured I should read up a bit. Several people recommended the HTML & CSS book by Jon Duckett on Twitter, so I decided to give it a shot.

As software developers, we spend a lot of time talking about the best ways to clean up a codebase and keep it maintainable. We want it to be fast, efficient, and generally perform well. This is just a friendly reminder to remember to apply the same principles to your own body.