Speaker: Darren Barefoot (see http://darrenbarefoot.com) Conference: Doc Train 2008 Introduction For most of human history, we had few-to-few communication. One person spoke to a few around a campfire. Then in the 1500s, along came the printing press, and gave rise to a few-to-many communication model. The power to communicate is placed in the hands of a few, which communicate to everyone else. Today with the web, we have a many-to-many m...
Listen here: In this short podcast, David Holmes talks about how he and his team migrated 50,000 unstructured pages to DITA. (DITA is an XML architecture that allows you to better single source your content.) Here's his official presentation title and a brief description: From Planning to Publishing: How Business Objects Migrated Documentation to DITA One Step at a Time In 2006, Business Objects faced a major challenge....
Guy Kawasaki writes, "A PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points" (The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint). I wish everyone who prepares a presentation would follow this advice. Long PowerPoints disrupt any kind of narrative flow and dynamic energy that can build up when you deliver your message.
Listen here: In this podcast, I talk with Alan Porter, vice president of Operations at WebWorks, about the Web 2.0 technologies they're using to reach out to their customer base. In addition to using blogs, wikis, and social networks to connect with customers, WebWorks also uses wikis to facilitate communication and collaboration within their company. Alan says they consider themselves a "wiki-driven company" because t...
One of the things I like about WordPress is its versatility. WordPress isn't just blogging software. With the right theme, you can build a website that doesn't resemble a blog at all. Essentially, writers who become familiar with WordPress become empowered as web designers as well. A few weeks ago, I made a website for a client who was launching a green building business (see or click the image below). It's a predesigned theme that I pur...
I wrote a WordPress Quick Start Guide in wiki format and posted it on the WordPress Codex. Check it out here: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Quick_Start_Guide. This guide gives you a quick introduction to the most important tasks and concepts in WordPress. It divides these tasks and concepts into five sections, outlined below: Get Set Up 1.1 Advantages of Self-Hosted WordPress Blogs 1.2 Become Familiar with FTP 1.3 Install Wor...
WordPress, the most widely used open-source blogging software, gives you complete control over the design and display of your content. In addition to writing blog posts, WordPress allows you to create pages, add categories, customize your site design, define how posts appear, and more. This two-hour course is designed for people unfamiliar with WordPress and interested in starting their own blogs, or for people ready for more control than...
I attended an STC chapter meeting tonight, and while the presenter had some excellent information, only 6 people showed up -- the presenter, the program manager, a new guy, two regulars, and me. I thought this was okay because we were recording the event anyway, but I'm sorry to report that I botched the recording. The mic jack wasn't snug in its socket, so you can't hear anything. I walked away tonight convinced that the STC model is br...
I updated the date and time for the WordPress course. Instead of this Saturday, I've moved it to next Wednesday evening. Here are the updated details: Date: Wednesday, April 30 Time: 7:30 p.m. CST Location: Web Cost: $99 Course Size: Limited to 15 participants I hope this can better accommodate all of you who emailed me to say that you have previous engagements this Saturday. If not, I'm sure I'll do some more training in the future. For ...
Blaze is a new Framemaker alternative that Madcap Software has just released into beta. With Blaze, you can create printed documentation and publish it to Word, Framemaker, PDF, XPS, and an XHTML book (but not webhelp). When I first heard of Blaze, my immediate question was — Doesn't Flare already publish to Word and FrameMaker? If so, why would I need Blaze? The short answer is, you don't need Blaze if you already have Flare. But if for ...
Listen here: DITA is a topic I've wanted to do a podcast on for a long time. When I heard a local technical writer express her enthusiasm about how she was using DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) at her company, I knew I found the right person. In this podcast, Marlene Martineau of New Dawn Technologies explains why they adopted DITA, how they adopted it, the benefits they're experiencing, and the reasons why...
I'm giving a training course on WordPress this Wednesday. If you've been thinking about getting a blog or switching from Blogger to WordPress, this course will help you get up and running with WordPress in a quick, efficient way. The short details are below. Date: Wednesday, April 30 Time: 7:30 - 9:30 p.m. CST Location: Web Cost: $99 Course Size: Limited to 15 participants For the full course description, see WordPress for Beginners Cours...
Even though I'm an advocate of blogging and think it's critical to tech comm, I've always been assigned technical documentation projects for internally used, confidential, or classified software. Documenting products promoted on the web has never been an option for me. However, I'm convinced that even internal software, which never sees the light of WWW, still needs a blog as much or more than products sold online. Even so, numerous corpo...
The Read/Write web has a fascinating post about the amount of time people spend in Web 2.0 activities. Here's a graph from their post that sums it up. In short, content creators, such as those who publish blogs and podcasts, spend 5-10 hrs a week. To be a community directory, you can spend 10-20 hrs. I distinctly remember a question Thom Haller asked me after my presentation last year at Doc Train West. He threw up his hands and said, "...
Find a way to have fun with what you're writing. If you don't, not only will it be a miserable experience, the product will lack the energy, playfulness, and good feeling it needs to be successful. Change your point of view, experiment, try something different -- until the routine becomes an exploration, and the monotonous becomes your musing. If that doesn't work, try reading a few lolcats to lighten things up.
