In the second part of this "The making of..." series, I will tell a little about setting up www.openlife.cc with Drupal.

The domain name

Already when I was publishing the Finnish book I prepared for an eventual translation and had in mind the name "Open Life". Unfortunately, domain names like openlife.org, openlife.info and openlife.net were already registered then, although none of those had functioning websites. I believe openlife.com might had been free, but even so, a .com name didn't feel appropriate. So instead of paying hundreds of dollars to transfer those to me, I did a trick I've used earlier too, I added a dash and registered open-life.org instead.

If you've had a look at the fine print you'll already know, the book cover was made using Creative Commons licensed images from the Internet. It is in itself supposed to be a testimony of how you can publish books and other things as part of an Open Source continuum. I wanted to make a nice cover image and I wanted to find and use only images licensed under suitably licensed pictures. Even if I could have used some clipart too, in this case I did not want to do that out of pure principle. I wanted everything in the book to be Open Source.