Nimble Books LLC

This is the latest incarnation of the Zimmerblog. I’ve been maintaining this website in one form or another since March 30, 1994, when I launched the Internet Book Information Center at Sunsite at http://www.sunsite.unc.edu/ibic. The site has morphed numerous times over the years and I am sure this will not be the last time. A brief history of the thinking and technology behind the previous versions:

• the Internet Book Information Center was just that, the first “mega-site” for books on the WWW — I launched 18 months before Amazon.com. Content was largely in hand-edited HTML. After a couple of years, I started using the mhonarc mail-to-html filter to automate the process of HTMLizing publisher announcements and press releases.
• I moved IBIC to internetbookinfo.com in 1999, hosted at the admirable pair.com. I experimented with a couple of different content management systems — Corante and PHPBB — before settling on Geeklog, which has been the primary repository for my web content since 2001. I’ve used Geeklog’s topic feature to set up a wide variety of topical websites such as onenoteinfocenter.com, tabletpcinfocenter.com, and rssfunbook.com. Over time I have become convinced that it is more cost-effective and makes better branding sense to name most of my websites as third-level domains to the master wfzimmerman.com.
• In 2003 I became seriously interested in writing and publishing and established my own company, Nimble Books LLC. I now have six books published via Lightning Source that are doing quite well as a secondary source of income.
• I have also found that the Geeklog story editor is a significant bottleneck. It’s a fine editor, but it just takes me too much time to edit and format stories. Also, it is not good practice to have my content “bound” into a particular database format.

When I saw the announcement for Blogger for Word, I realized that the time was ripe for another makeover that will make it much more transparent for me to publish interesting and relevant content at the Zimmerblog. With this post, I am now moving to the following information architecture for the Zimmerblog.

• All my content ultimately resides in primary document formats — Word, .txt, or image — on my home PC, backed up to DVD and secondary hard disk.
• I use tools like Acrobat and Blogger to export content to the appropriate delivery format — PDF or XML.
• I continue to maintain the Geeklog database as The Zimmerblog Archive (archive.wfzimmerman.com) so that persons searching for particular documents that have been indexed by the major search engines can proceed directly to them.
• The “top layer” of my websites is now provided by html remote published from Blogger to pair. “General” users, those reaching my website by addresses other than archive.wfzimmerman.com, are now redirected to this top layer, where it is my intention that they will find fresh, interesting content in greater volumes than before.
• “Project” blogs, such as Proliferated and Unauthorized J. K. Rowling News and Analysis, are set up as independent “streams” of content, but, of course, you can easily navigate from one blog to another. I plan to create a “master” blog that holds all posts from all my blogs.

Welcome aboard!