This book has a lot of URLs (web addresses), specifically a lot of YouTube addresses. YouTube addresses are made from random letters, like this:
| www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbZdcEoXeGQ (URL P.11) |
Those are kinda hard to type correctly, so there's a lot of room for error. They're made for linking, not for typing. So, we've taken care of that for you by putting a link number (formatted as a chapter.link, as in URL 1.1, URL 1.2, URL 1.3 for the first three links in Chapter 1) for every link in this book, and then we've linked them for you on a page on Alan's site, here:
| http://viralvideowannabe.com/ytlinks (URL P.12) |
Type that in your browser once, bookmark it, and you can easily reference every link to videos and websites in this book without having to actually type them.
The URLs are mirrored on the O'Reilly site, too:
| www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596521141 (URL P.13) |
There are tradeoffs when making art with other people. Sometimes I write books and self-publish them. I have complete creative control but don't reach as many people or make as much money as when I write books for a company. When doing art with a company, it's a balancing act with other people's ideas. I try to fit each project to the right method of distribution, and it seemed to me that this book was better suited to being done with a company, so I had to be a team player. I can wear that hat.
I got along great with the team working on this book. The only disagreement we had was about the formatting of URLs. I contended that when a sentence ends with a URL, there should not be a period at the end of the URL. I was voted down on this. So, in this book, if a URL falls at the end of a sentence, it will be followed by a period. I think this is confusing, and even though it does conform to standard rules of English, I believe we're at a time in progress where that rule should change, because URLs with periods at the end don't work. Most people who have been on the Internet for a while know not to type the period, or a dash added by a line break. We've provided a page with clickable links without the periods but I had to state my feelings on this, because there are probably a few people new to the Internet reading this book who would type the URL with the period and wonder why the URL didn't work if I didn't explain it.