Leave It Behind > Brian Bailey

Vacation planning via satellite

Here's a fun idea I never thought of until this trip. Why not use the incredible satellite images available through Google Earth, Virtual Earth and others, to help plan a vacation?

You know how hard it is to choose between hotels? So often, you wish you could just drive by your choices - if you were there, it would only take a few seconds to eliminate some of your options. Using the satellite view on most mapping sites, you can get a great look at where you'll be staying. What kind of neighborhood is the hotel in? Is it right on the highway? Is it surrounded by office buildings, shopping and restaurants, or industrial sites? Is the zoo close to the museum, or are they further apart than the addresses would indicate?

Even better, how close is the hotel to the lake or ocean, really? "Walking distance" means different things to people who travel and people who write marketing copy. This sneak peek gives you a much better idea of where you'll be staying. Check out our last two vacation locations...

Last year, we stayed at Hidden Dunes in Destin, Florida, which we loved. Using the satellite view, you can see a lot of things we didn't know until we pulled in late one night - how close the property is to a busy road, stores, condos and other hotels. You can see the tennis courts and the beach that was a short walk away. View the map.

This year, we're staying right next to the Arch in St. Louis. How close will we be? Take a look. You can also see the nearby baseball stadium, but that's the old one. Unfortunately, the images are not always current, so you probably don't want to base your decision solely on this view, but it can be a great help. View the map.

37signals sale

37signals is running a rare promotion. For a limited time, you can upgrade from a free Basecamp, Backpack, or Campfire account and receive a $5 or $10 discount on your first month. Basecamp is an amazing project management tool that just keeps getting better. We've also made great use of Campfire chats recently and most of you are tired of hearing me rave about Backpack.

All I'll say about it is that in the last 30 days, I've used Backpack to write a book, launch a website, plan a vacation, and remind me to get the oil changed on our cars. It's a wonderful, simple place to collect the many hundreds of ideas and pieces of information that pass through your mind each day. Plus, you can share these pages with as many people as you want.

If you're interested in giving the paid version a try, now is the time!

St. Louis

Next week, Lori, Ben and I will leave for our long-awaited summer vacation! We're driving to St. Louis to spend a few days with Lori's brother and family, who are driving from Michigan. We're so excited that Ben will get to spend some time with two of his cousins - summer just doesn't seem like summer without cousins.

We're staying in downtown St. Louis, one block from the Arch and one block from the Cardinal's new stadium. We will even get to enjoy fourth of July fireworks right on the river, underneath the Arch, in the heart of the midwest. What could be more American than that?

It still feels like a miracle that this vacation is going to happen, because it means that the book is finished and the new website is live. What's funny is that I've always known that a website is never really finished, but I had no idea that a book is never actually done.

One of our favorite movies is What About Bob? Do you remember the scene when Dr. Leo Marvin attempts to convince his family that Bob (Bill Murray) has never really left. "You think he's gone? He's not gone! That's the whole point! He's never gone!" That's exactly what writing a book is like.

You think it's done? It's not done! That's the whole point! The book is never done!

In the three weeks since I turned in the "final" draft, I've been contacted by four different Jossey-Bass employees about a bio, release forms for contributors, author photo, forward, and, probably the most fun topic, book cover design. This is in addition to a fresh round of edits to the initial manuscript and long before we get to the actual proofs and marketing. Now I have it in my mind that the book will be done when I hold it in my hands, but in a way, that's just the beginning - you have to actually sell it, afterall!

So, I face one more book deadline before the trip, but after that, it should be a care-free few days! What are some of the cool vacations you guys have planned for this summer?

The All-New CreativePastors

Early on Friday morning, the new version of CreativePastors.com went live! CreativePastors is the Ed Young resource site for pastors and church leaders, featuring sermon transcripts, books, message and service development tools, MP3s, conference, and a lot more.

The site is driven by many of the same design and development principles that have guided the three previous sites we've released in the last 14 months - standards-based and CSS-driven using PHP, PostgreSQL, and Linux. All of our websites now share identical platforms (code, servers, hosting), which will be a huge help as we move forward.

Here's a quick overview of some of the improvements and changes...

1. Brand-new look built around the new logo
2. Greatly improved navigation to make things much easier to find
3. Better product search
4. Integrating blog and podcast content into the front page
5. One page checkout
6. Find everything related to a message series on a single page
7. Add a product to your cart without leaving the page
8. One page account management, including downloads and order history
9. Unbelievably smaller and faster pages
10. Related products

As any web person knows all to well, this is just the start. This is one of the few projects I've worked on where the post-launch list is longer than the pre-launch list. The CreativePastors team is one of the most, well, creative groups I've been around and there are many great ideas on their way. My thanks to them and my team for all the time and effort it took to make this happen.

Checkout the new CreativePastors.com!

Blogging Goes Bigtime

How do you know when blogging has arrived? When a blogger leaves a company and the news is worthy of the Wall Street Journal homepage. Word spread yesterday that Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft for a position with a Silicon Valley start-up, PodTech.net. In fact, the story was ranked higher than a fresh wave of violence in Baghdad. The news is also in the print Journal this morning.

Congratulations, Robert, on your fresh start! It's great news that you'll be closer to your son, and I know you'll do incredible things at PodTech!

Now, I just need to edit about three stories in the book :)

Survey says?

Sometime between his birthday in September and Christmas, it looks like Ben will finally be getting his first game system. He has always loved everything computer-related, but this year is the first time he has become way into video games. Our iMac has kept him relatively satisfied through Lego Star Wars and Star Wars Battlefront, but he has reached the point where waiting 6-12 months for a game to (possibly) come out for the Mac is just not going to cut it. Unfortunately, the iMac is a G5, so the Windows dual-boot option is not possible.

We are in the unique position of being completely open to any of the new machines: Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's Playstation 3, and Nintendo's Wii.

This is where you come in. We would love to know which machine you recommend and why. Despite the fact the two of the machines are months away from being released, Ben has managed to research them extensively. We're still not sure which way to go, though.

To give you an idea of our two-person target market, Ben is about to turn 11 and loves games like the two mentioned above, as well as Backyard Baseball and other good, clean fun games. Battlefront is his first of the older, more violent types, and it passed primarily because of the Star Wars familiarity and science fiction feel. I'm not planning to go much further down that path for a couple of years.

I, on the other hand, love sports games, primarily baseball and soccer (something completely missing from the Mac). The ability for the machine to serve as a DVD player as well is a plus. We do not currently have an HD television. Online gaming is, right now, of little interest.

Our biggest hesitations right now are...

Playstation 3 - price, BlueRay question marks
Xbox 360 - it will already be a year old
Wii - possible lack of big name games and series

I know many of you have strong opinions about gaming systems (Scoble? Evan?), so let's here them! Make your case for the best choice and why, and Ben and I will both be very grateful. Thanks!

Fetch Rules!

PBS has launched a brand-new kids show, Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman. This is just the second week and only seven shows have aired so far.

Fetch has to be the best television show I have ever seen for kids. Ben is 10 and he loves it. Lori and I are a few years older than 10 and we love it, too. In fact, I would consider it a family show more than a kids show. I think any child over seven would enjoy it.

Here's the basic idea. Fetch is a cartoon dog who has his own game show. The season consists of 20 episodes with the same six kids competing for points. Fetch sends the kids on different challenges that they have to complete to earn points. The challenges so far have included such things as preparing food for animals in a zoo, learning hip-hop dance moves, filming a commercial for the show with real cats, and working in a diner.

The show is fast-paced, very funny, intelligent, incredibly creative, and educational. The kids are smart, normal, well-adjusted Bostonians.

TiVO a couple of episodes and see if you fall in love with Fetch!

Done

On Monday morning, I emailed the manuscript for The Blogging Church to Jossey-Bass! Lori, Ben and I all gathered around the computer for the momentous click. Those two have been absolutely incredible throughout - there definitely wouldn't be a book without them.

The last month has been quite an experience. I've been writing nearly every waking moment that I wasn't working or eating. Most of it was a lot of fun as I do better when I have no choice but to focus on one thing. In many cases, I ended up writing more in a day than I used to write in a week, leading me to wonder what I've been doing for the past year :)

At least I wondered that until I totally hit a creative wall at the very end. That's when I doubted I would ever put coherent words together to form a sentence again! I was also surprised at how long the editing and formatting part took after the last words were written. I wish I had had about 2 weeks to do that, but I'm sure I'll have plenty of looks at it before everything is final.

The final word count was 63,298 over 16 chapters, 7 interviews, and 1 preface. Word count is something I knew nothing about before this book, so here's a little background. The average paperback has 250 words per page and the average hardcover has 300. The Blogging Church is going to be published in paperback, so the current version would be approximately 250 pages. To give some examples, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is 37K words, To Kill a Mockingbird is 100K, Harry Potter books are between 150K and 250K words, and the New Testament is 138K.

What's fascinating about the book process is that each step is something completely different. The proposal/contract process had little similarity with the last 9 months of writing, and next comes a few weeks of editing and revision, followed by the marketing fun of finalizing the cover and promotional details.

And just in case any of you might still be wondering if this whole thing is just vaper-paper, here's the (Currently Not Available) book, live on Amazon.com!