Amazon sales rank plummeting again

The sales rank for the book has fallen through the floor finally, having been buoyed by publicity from various quarters, not least you guys. There's an event horizon for all publicity, a point beyond which the message won't escape, regardless of how loud you shout, and I think we might have reached it. I've tried to get in touch with people who could push it out further, but to no avail so far. People are still buying the book, and probably in greater numbers than they ever have before, but the initial rush seems to have died down. I still have no idea exactly how many books have sold, as Lulu won't get their figures together for a little while yet, but I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who's bought a book, donated their hard-earned money or promoted the books for bricks site. You're all brilliant, and we appreciate each and every one of you.

I'm going to keep on promoting, whenever I think of a new way to get the message out, so this is not the end, but I don't think I'm likely to see sales ranks of the kind I saw last week again. You took my little book and briefly put it amongst the big boys. It was outselling all sorts of relatively high-profile books and it felt really, really good, so thank you again.

ASP.NET on Ubuntu

I seem to have accidentally done something rather cool. I got the email to tell me my new Bytemark hosting was set up this morning, and promptly dived in to set some stuff installing. I threw on the usual LAMP stack for the hosting requirements I already had, then told it to go get Mono, because I figured with an up to date Ubuntu distro I might stand a chance of hosting some .NET scheduled apps or daemons up there. I ended up with mod_mono installed as well, so I decided to test it. One quick demo app later and it turns out I can now host ASP.NET on the new box as well as PHP. Result! It's by no means as quick as PHP (though that might be subject to optimisation, I don't know yet), but it definitely works. If it works well enough I might just cancel the windows hosting I'd set up for the Sequoia projects and go with my own hosting. The Sequoia Solutions website will soon feature a blog where I'll try to put some interesting content up about once a week. I think I'll be doing a write up of the steps involved in getting this working for a start.

Bear in mind, this was done almost entirely unintentionally and took no more than 10 minutes from start to finish. I think that's pretty good for getting a working ASP.NET environment going, regardless of what the host OS is!