Why No One Will Hire You: 40 Professionals Give Advice on Improving a Technical Writer's Resume [Collaborative Post]

A reader asks, Is my resume so awful that no one will hire me? I mean, I'd been laid-off so long it's pitiful really. His resume is here. I opened up this question up to my friends on Twitter and to those who follow my blog. About 40 professional technical writers responded with all kinds of resume advice. The overall trend in the responses is for the writer to add more detail to his resume, to expand on his education, tools, online pr...

Downloading Audio from the STC Summit

The Summit @ a Click offering for STC Summit attendees allows you to download the audio and slide recordings of the majority of the sessions. However, most people don't know how to download just the audio. In this screencast, I show you how to download the MP3 file from each session.

WordPress Tip: Changing the Styles on Your WordPres Blog

You can change the styles on your site easily by using Firebug and the Web Developer Extension. Both of these are extensions for Firefox. Using these two tools, you can find out what styles control the various elements of your site and then make the appropriate changes. I also explain how to add your new or updated styles to the right css file so that they overwrite the previous styles declared in other stylesheets.

Instructional Design Versus Technical Communication

Today I was trying to learn more about elearning when I stumbled across Tom Kulman's Rapid eLearning Blog and was sucked into the content for the next fifteen minutes. The visuals on his blog are intriguing. They're the kind of visuals I wish I had on my blog. They remind me a little of the visual artistry on The Oatmeal. Even more genius, he promises a 47 page ebook on elearning if you sign up for email delivery of his posts. And here's ...

Searching STC Resources for Information

One of the advantages of belonging to the Society for Technical Communication (STC) is having access to the rich information sources on technical communication. These sources include Intercom, the Technical Communication Journal, past proceedings from conferences, the Notebook blog, and more. Unfortunately, there isn't a single search that allows you to comprehensively search all of these sources at once. I this screencast, I show you how...

WordPress Tip: Making Your WP-CONFIG File Secure

A lot of people don't realize that they're missing unique authentication keys in their WordPress's wp-config.php file. These unique authentication keys will help keep your WordPress site more secure. In this screencast, I show you how to add the necessary authentication keys.

You learn more from users in 5 minutes than you do from 2 weeks of project meetings

I recently had a project with a small group of users, maybe 35. I joined the project about a month before the scheduled release. I wasn't sure what kind of help the app needed, or what format. A wiki? Screencasts? Online help? A short PDF? I talked with the lead customer, and he hadn't given much thought about help. I talked with the project manager, a quality assurance engineer, and a developer. The PM didn't know what kind of help the a...

WordPress Tip: Editing Posts in Bulk

When you have a lot of posts to change, you can bulk edit the posts by changing the number of posts shown in the screen options menu before applying the edit.

WordPress Tip: Inserting a Gallery of Images into a Post

When you upload photos to a post in WordPress, the photos become associated with the post. If you insert the word gallery in brackets (as shown below), the post will show all the post's photos in a thumbnail grid. [gallery]

WordPress Tip: Adding Custom Fields in Posts

You can add custom fields below posts, and then pull out the values of those custom fields and insert them into a template. This reduces the sophistication behind styling post data, and automates the display in a template. This technique relies on the Custom Fields Template plugin.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3VXnryN9iY Here are the main steps: 1. Install the Custom Field Template. 2. Navigate to Appearance > Editor and include thi...

40 Foundational Books for Technical Writing

I received the following question from a reader: I have semi-transitioned to a new position at my job where I’m responsible for creating and maintaining documentation for our systems, programs, policies, etc. I was selected for the position because I have written many tutorials for our applications to be read by new employees. Since I have no formal education in writing (I love to write, but I majored in accounting with a masters in infor...

WordPress Tip: Implementing Photo Galleries

If you have a lot of photos, you can implement them into galleries and albums using the NextGen Gallery plugin. This image gallery plugin is one of the most robust plugins for uploading, managing, captioining, and tagging images. It works well if you have a lot of images that you constantly upload and display on your site.

Why Learning Software Is So Hard, and Organizing Content into Levels [Organizing Content #26]

Findability / organizing content 1.0 New Series: Organizing Content [Organizing Content 1] 1.2 Introducing Project Swordfish [Organizing Content 2] 1.3 Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold [Organizing Content 3] ...

WordPress Tip: Moving Images with Site Migrations

If you've ever had to migrate a WordPress site, moving images from one host to another, you know how tedious and time-consuming this process is. In this WordPress screencast, I provide a tip that helps you move the images in a seamless, simple way that almost seems like magic using the Cache Images plugin.

WordPress Tip: Adding an Edit Link for Each Post

You can add an "Edit" link in the metadata below your post title. This Edit link makes it easy to edit the specific post without having to navigate through the Posts section of your WordPress Dashboard. Here's the edit snippet of code that I mention in the screencast: <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ''); ?> Add this code snippet somewhere within the loop, such as with the post metadata.