Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animals on the cover of Running Weblogs with Slash are crows. Crows belong to the family Corvidae. The American Crow (Corvus brachyrynchos) is 17 to 21 inches long when fully grown and weighs approximately 1 lb. Crows in the wild can live to be approximately 10 years old (the oldest known wild American Crow lived to a whopping 29 1/2), but they are often carried off prematurely by predators and disease. Crows are omnivorous and will eat just about anything, from insects, worms, and mice, to berries and corn, to food scraps discarded by humans. An adult crow needs 11 ounces of food each day. Crows' black coloration helps to protect them from predators at night and allows them to easily identify other members of their species during the day, when they are highly visible.

Crows are believed to be the most intelligent of all birds. They exhibit many characteristics generally considered to be indications of higher intelligence, including problem solving, toolmaking, and the ability to play, as well as excellent memory, communication, and mimicry skills. Crows are also extremely social--not only will crows defend and protect their own families, but they will come to the aid of unrelated crows in need or distress. They live in large extended family groups and typically mate for life. Crows are cooperative breeders--while males do not usually incubate the eggs, they do bring food and guard the nest. Offspring remain with their parents for one to six years and help their parents raise their new broods. In the fall and winter, crows gather in roosts to sleep at night. Crow roosts can range from small scattered roosts of under 100 individuals to the spectacularly large roosts of hundreds of thousands or even more than a million crows. Matt Hutchinson was the production editor and the copyeditor for Running Weblogs with Slash. Rachel Wheeler and Sheryl Avruch provided quality control. Ellen Troutman-Zaig wrote the index.

Emma Colby designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is an original illustration created by Susan Hart. Emma Colby and Melanie Wang produced the cover layout with QuarkXPress 4.1 using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.

Melanie Wang designed the interior layout based on a series design by Nancy Priest. The print version of this book was created by translating the DocBook XML markup of its source files into a set of gtroff macros using a filter developed at O'Reilly & Associates by Norman Walsh. Steve Talbott designed and wrote the underlying macro set on the basis of the GNU troff --gs macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to XML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff text formatter Version 1.11.1 was used to generate PostScript output. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book; the code font is Constant Willison. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand 9 and Adobe Photoshop 6. This colophon was written by Rachel Wheeler.