My colleague Ben Minson wrote a post about why tripane help is a relic of the book-paradigm documentation age, and how it can limit us from taking advantage of other web technologies. See Why I Don’t Like Tri-pane Help. As a quick definition, tripane help is the standard webhelp HTML output that has several frames — the table of contents pane on the left, the … more »

Ben Minson and I attended Don Moyer‘s session on drawing for technical communicators. Don explained simple drawing techniques to illustrate concepts. I asked Ben Minson, an artist, to comment on Don’s session and evaluate whether he thinks the techniques would be useful or practical in the workplace.

Congrats to the winner of yesterday’s contest. (I added the winner’s name at the end of the comment thread of the last post.) Let the contest continue with Day 2′s cartoon, again drawn by the talented Ben Minson of Gryphon Mountain. The winner of this caption contest will receive a free copy of Camtasia Studio, courtesy of TechSmith. For full contest, details, see this post. … more »

This week I returned from the annual STC Summit in Atlanta. Every year is always a series of adventures at these conferences. I’d never been to Atlanta before. I arrived a day early, because I was originally scheduled to give a workshop on blogging, but it was canceled due to lack of participants. Attendance at the STC Summit overall was down by about 35%. I … more »

This Thursday, my colleague Ben Minson and I are presenting to the Intermountain STC chapter on “Quick Reference Guides: Short and Sweet Technical Documentation.” Here’s a description of the presentation:

Everyone knows it’s a good practice to chunk your help material into discrete topics, but how granular should you chunk it? Take a look at this Microsoft Word 2007 help topic on inserting headers and footers. Although inserting headers and footers is the main task, the topic really has 11 related tasks: Insert the same header or footer on each page Make the first page … more »

The following is a guest post by Ben Minson, one of my technical writing colleagues. Ben’s blog, which also focuses on technical communication, is called Gryphon Mountain Journals. Check it out. (You can subscribe to his RSS feed here.) My wife recently bought a book for me entitled Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers. Blogging has been around for about ten … more »

“Technical Communicator” is a term that, as much as I dislike, can be extremely important for triggering Google Alerts set up by the Society for Technical Communication‘s Intercom editorial staff. How do I know this? Well, a couple of months ago I saw a summary of my blog post on video cameras and SMEs mentioned in the STC Intercom’s Cut & Paste section (shown below). … more »

Just a few days after someone begins blogging seriously, he or she starts hungering after subscribers and comments. We want readership, we want lots of people visiting our site, reading our posts, subscribing to our feed, and regularly leaving comments. This, my friend Clyde says, is the “payoff” of blogging. Although I try to write for a higher purpose outside of trying to get more … more »