I'd Rather Be Writing

Sarah O’Keefe’s guest post — The Role of the Gatekeeper is Changing — on Peg Mulligan’s blog is interesting. Sarah writes, The Internet is removing the traditional gatekeepers for content. This may seem obvious, but its implications in my life have been profound. I majored in English and then earned an MFA in creative writing.  Read more »

How to break into technical writing is one of the most common questions readers ask. (If you wrote a book entirely on this subject, I’m sure you’d sell regular copies.) Recently a journalist interviewed me and others (Jack Molisani, Mike Hughes, and Andrea Ames) on this topic. He published his article, called Use Your IT Experience  Read more »

Wordcamp is a conference dedicated to topics on WordPress. This year WordCamp Utah will be held Saturday, August 28 at the University of Utah. The conference costs $20 and includes lunch. Here are details from Joseph Scott, the organizer: WordCamp Utah 2010 will be held August 28th at University of Utah, in the Skaggs Biology  Read more »

I’ve been exploring Captivate lately because I wanted to translate some screencasts for a project I’m undertaking. It turns out, Captivate doesn’t work so well for screencasting. Slide-based eLearning, sure. But when you have a lengthy software simulation, it fails because you can’t edit the audio while watching the video play. Really? Yes. Really. You  Read more »

At least once a month, I post a few messages from the sponsors. Today we have a message from Madcap Software and Techsmith. From Madcap Software Driven by customer demand and request, MadCap Software is pleased to announce MadCap Consulting, a new service aimed to provide our customers with the resources necessary to perform skilled technical  Read more »

I’m giving a webinar on WordPress tomorrow, July 13, at 1:00 to 2:30 pm EDT. The webinar is organized through the STC Consulting and Independent Contracting Special Interest Group (CIC SIG). Here’s the description: Blogging is no longer a phenomenon. It is a way of life; another layer of communication to understand and utilize. An  Read more »

On Tuesday, July 13, TechSmith is create 24 Screencasts About Camtasia in 24 Hours. It must be fun to do screencasts at 3 a.m. If you’re into screencasts (and use Camtasia), these sessions should provide a lot of good information. They’re streaming the screencasts live here and are also recording them to publish later.

I’ve been researching how to translate screencasts. Here’s one problem to overcome: Even if you use youtube’s caption system, if you embed the translated videos on a web page, will users have to select both their language and captions? Normally, we want the video to display these automatically if we’re embedding the video a page  Read more »

Notepad++ is my favorite text editor, but lately it’s been acting a bit berzerk. Every time I open it, NotePad++ says Load Config.xml failed, or something like that. It’s been bugging me for weeks. I finally found the fix here. If you get a load config.xml failed message, take these general steps to fix it:  Read more »

If you’re looking for a solid professional development opportunity, check out the Lavacon Conference this year. Held September 29 to October 2 in San Diego, California, the conference focuses on learning how to “publish digital content that enhances the customer experience, reduces production costs and promotes your online brand.” If you read the session descriptions,  Read more »