Day 26: Getting Published

Sunday, March 23, 2003

One way to market yourself and add to your body of work is to write an article and get it published. Surprisingly, writing in your blog about the minutiae of building a business just does not cut it. By writing for websites, magazines, newspapers, etc., you establish yourself as an expert in your field. People like to hire experts.

Today, Angela submitted an article to the eMonitor. She reviewed a piece of software we think highly of. Once it’s published — I have no doubt it will be — I’ll post a URL. This is exactly the kind of publicity we are looking for. As we both write more articles like this, it will help establish our reputation.

I’m working, slowly but surely, on Crafty Goat. The poorly placed one-item list you see is a database-driven category menu. A function in my CraftyGoat package generates this menu based on the information you pass to it. Each category item has an id number. Sub categories also have a parent id associated with them. If you do not pass the function any parameters, it creates a list of all the main categories (categories that do not have a parent id assigned to them). If you pass a category id to the function, then it generates a sub list of categories associated with that category id, and places that sub list within the list item for said category. Now we need some formatting and some positioning.