Here's the cartoon for Day 1 of the Christmas in June Giveaway. The person who comes up with the best caption for this cartoon wins a free copy of Snagit. Add your captions in the comments below. For full details about the giveaway, see this post. Day 1 Cartoon Ben Minson, a technical communicator who blogs at Gryphon Mountain, drew this cartoon. Actually, Ben will be drawing all our cartoons, so get to know him.
For the next 12 days, I'm coordinating with various companies to give away a product a day, as part of a 12 Days of Christmas in June theme. This is an opportunity to try out new software that may be new to you, for companies to receive a bit of promotion, and to kick off the blog fun that will last all summer long. Here's how the contest works: Each morning at 6 a.m. MST I'll post a new cartoon, hand-drawn by my colleague Ben Minson of G...
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This week I needed to create some visuals for a PowerPoint to illustrate concepts related to blogging. Since I have limited artistic ability (perhaps even negative artistic ability), I resorted to a stick figure person as a common theme. I spent a while trying to decide which tool to use to draw with. It turns out drawing a basic circle in Photoshop that doesn't have a solid fill is tedious, as are other drawing functions in Photoshop. So...
WordPress's threaded comments feature is not entirely now; it's been around since 2.7 (the current version of WordPress is 2.7.1). But even though under Settings > Discussion you see the ability to activate threaded comments and indicate how many levels deep you want it to be, you have to actually make some changes to your theme for threaded comments to work. The following screenshot shows an example of threaded comments. Threaded Comm...
When choosing a blog platform, you have a variety of options: Drupal, Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger, Joomla, Expression Engine, WordPress.com, self-hosted WordPress, and others. But when you start researching the options, WordPress seems to have at least 10 main strengths over its competitors: Abundant Themes. You can choose from hundreds of already developed themes to immediately apply to your blog, so that you don't have to design yo...
Listen here: In this podcast, I talk with Anne Gentle about her forthcoming book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. Anne explains how we've transitioned from the Age of Information to the Age of Interaction, using social web tools to find the information we need. She builds on her experiences with One Laptop per Child, Book Sprints, and her experiences as a corporate blogger for BMC software. ...
Even if you aren't watching the NBA playoffs (professional basketball), you'll probably get the point of this post. Watching a pro basketball team, one thing you realize is that each player has a special position and strength, and they play those strengths rather than their weaknesses. Kenyon Martin screens for Carmelo Anthony For example, even when Kenyon Martin has an open jump shot 20 feet away, he often doesn't take the shot but inste...
I helped another person whose WordPress site was hacked this weekend. I've noticed a trend about sites that get hacked. Most of the people installed their WordPress blog either long ago, before the right security phrases were included in the wp-config.php file, or they installed WordPress through an auto-installer that didn't insert the right security phrases. The wp-config.php file is the key file that contains your database name and pas...
Listen here: In this podcast, I talk with Anna Parker Richards, incoming president of the STC Toronto chapter, about their event-driven chapter model, in which they replace regular meetings with periodic all-day events, charging between $50 to $150 per person. They haven't entirely discarded meetings in favor of events, but have instead supplemented the events with social gatherings. Their new model, the Five and Five Mo...
Listen here: In this podcast, I talk with Richard Hamilton about his new publishing imprint, XML Press. Richard started XML Press to serve the needs of technical communicators, publishing books on topics that may not get traction from large publishing houses due to the limited audience, but which perfectly fit a smaller, niche technical communication audience. Focusing on practical topics that technical communicators can...
Listen here: At the STC Summit, I ran into someone from Australia who follows my wife's blog fairly regularly and had even brought gifts for her and the kids. It made me reflect on blog subscribers, and how you convert readers from being occasional readers to devoted fans. In this podcast, Kirsty Taylor talks about what she finds appealing about Seagull Fountain (my wife's blog) and other blogs she follows. Kirsty explai...
A couple of months ago, I wanted to start a podcast at my work, and so I interviewed someone who has been in our IT department for 28 years about the evolution of the department over the years. The podcast took about a month to get approved, and the week before it was posted, as I was tracking down the person who controlled our iTunes feed and Feedburner, I found that another department, Digital Media, was in the process of launching a fu...
Listen here: In this podcast, Mike Hamilton of Madcap Software talks about their phased approach to handling DITA with Flare. In Phase I, you'll have the ability to import DITA topics and export to webhelp and other targets. In this sense, Flare functions as a transform engine. In Phase 2, you can use Flare for native DITA authoring. Phase 1 is on the cusp of release, but Phase II won't be available until quarter one of ...
Listen here: In this podcast, Sarah O'Keefe of Scriptorium Publishing explains the results of their recent survey about the state of structured authoring in technical communication. In the survey, they found that 84% of respondents are either thinking of moving to structured authoring, are in the process of moving to structured authoring, have already adopted structured authoring, or are undecided. Only 16% of respondent...
