The past week has been very productive for the (formerly known as) Atlas team, despite some big changes our group has faced.

We started out the semester intending to publish a multi-platform book using O'Reilly's new browser-based publishing tool Atlas. We learned last week that Atlas would soon be discontinued, so we have shifted our focus.

This week we determined some major section headings for our book, decided on a style for designing our case study, and we're in the midst of polishing content for inclusion in the book.

Nick's @ Nine (content team) will be focusing on a few things from here on out:

Since the beginning of time, language has been the medium for humans to share ideas. Before the advent of the written word, oral histories were passed down from generation to generation as a means of preserving the past. Then, as written communication really began to develop, people realized that the act of putting pen (or quill) to paper made their words permanent. To put it simply, written words seemed to mean something.

The Atlas team spent last week and this week trying to get back in the swing of things after Spring Break. Since the semester is quickly coming to an end, we are trying to kick things into high gear and really make some progress on this project.

One large announcement: the Atlas team will no longer be using Atlas (ironic, I know). Unfortunately, O'Reilly Media has decided to discontinue Atlas in a few short months, and this has affected our access to the site. Instead of spending time trying to learn an application that will soon cease to exist, we're re-directing our efforts.

I found Chapter 12 of APE to be an extremely informative and useful chapter. The way the authors broke down the different self-publishing options was super easy to understand and I feel like any author who is just getting interested in self-publishing would benefit from reading this chapter.

The absolute most interesting part of this chapter for me, though, was the Espresso Book Machine. As a coffee lover, the word "espresso" immediately caught my eye and made me seriously crave a Skinny Vanilla Latte from Starbucks (#basic, I know).

This week the Atlas team continued to make progress on the collaborative project. I was able to show the team the Atlas interface and how to create a new file, and this helped everyone get a better sense of what the program really does.

The content team is still focusing on conducting interviews with Clemson faculty and staff who are involved with Writing Across the Curriculum. They will also be curating content from several sources provided by Dr. Blakesley for pieces that we can include in our final book.

We've decided to meet outside of class again right after Spring Break so that we can check in on our progress.