I've just shipped v7 of Dada Mail! Dada Mail is a web-based mailing list manager, written in Perl. It's a project I started way back in 1999 - one of those, "started in my dorm room" types of projects.
I'm currently catching my breath from the big push to finally Ship, but it feels good to get it all done.
One of the more interesting (to me) aspects of this release was to finally ship a PDF manual. I write most of the docs in Plain Old Documentation (with a little HTML sprinkled in), which is then turned into HTML, which is then! then turned into a PDF book. I've been wrestling with how best to do with, but it turned out just using HTMLDoc directly was the best way to go about things. A little (minor) futzing with my POD/HTML to make the table of contents pretty is all I needed to do. I already and still have an HTML version of the manual online for people to utilize, but now people can download it and read it on their favorite device, which a lot of my users have been clamoring for.
I think I surprised myself to know that the book surprised 300 pages by a wide margin! That's a lot of writing! It gives me a lot of confidence to write another book, since I can't tell myself, "Well, books are long! And there's no way you'll ever write that much!" . I can now tell myself, "Whoops! You somewhat mistakenly already have! DO IT AGAIN!"
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