Last year, when I received an email asking me to review a book about MongoDB and Pentaho for free, I barely opened the email before marking it as spam; “an outsourcing shop looking for desperate freelance editors? No, thanks!” I’d never heard of Packt Publishing before, and they were asking me to donate my time for a commercial project!

I’d used MongoDB in Pentaho before, and knew it was a “NoSQL” implant to the relational database world of Pentaho. It piqued my interest however; I wanted to see how someone can write a whole book about a relationship that was still in its infancy, and (at least back when I used it) hardly had any real utility beside the basic operations. I was also curious about the process of writing, editing, and publishing an ebook, so I just bit the bullet; “I’m in!”

Overall, I probably spent 15 to 20 hours to read the 100 something pages of the book, and didn’t get to communicate directly with the author. I only exchanged emails with the coordinators in India. The book was surprisingly well written, and it covered every possible aspect of using MongoDB in Pentaho. At the end, I received a physical copy of the book as a token of appreciation, and was able to download one of their ebooks for free. It wasn’t all for nothing after all!

If you’re interested in the subject, and are immune to people’s advice against using MongoDB, I’d recommend having a look at the book (obviously without any monetary benefit to me). Otherwise, there are a lot of books and tutorials about the great open-source BI suite that is Pentaho, and many other choices of reliable NoSQL databases other than MongoDB. ElasticSearch seems to be an emergent contender in that space.

After hosting a single-page site/resume on Nearly Free Speech for a while, I decided to shop around for a more reliable host so I can start blogging. I don’t have a plan to write often, but this will be a platform to share ideas once in a while.

After looking around, Github Pages seemed to be one of the best options out there for a couple of reasons:

• It is free
• You can use Jekyll natively

The only catch is it’s only free if you use a public Github repository, and if you are a secretive type that may change your notes often or hide them, one can easily go through your commit history and find about your juicy secrets! Now I couldn’t care less about that aspect, so what you see here is currently hosted on a public repository.

As for Jekyll’s boilerplate and themes, I find Jekyll Bootstrap to be very helpful to set up a Jekyll site. I had to massage it a little bit, and add a paginated blog page, but it was straightforward overall. Of course, you can have a look at the source code here.

Suggestions are welcome. Please feel free to email them, until I decide whether or not it’s a good idea to use third-party commenting engines (e.g. Disqus).