A reader asks, Technical writing is a field that I’ve been pursuing and about to complete a certification. My question, how important or valuable would also pursuing a web design certificate for a technical writer? The certificate in web design? Not necessary. But a working knowledge of HTML and CSS? Yes, critical, because everything is moving (or already moved about 10 years ago) to the … more »

IT Author’s latest podcast, Testing testing 123, dives into testing. Rather than just commenting on testing from a technical writer’s point of view, Alistair Christie and his co-host Graham Campbell interviewed an actual tester. It’s a good interview with lots of informational nuggets. For example, “regression testing” is testing those software features that were tested previously. Every new feature has the potential to affect other … more »

With my ongoing series on organizing content, I left off at the question of whether blog platforms would outperform help authoring tools as a way to organize content for web environments. I had a lot of thoughts about that topic, and actually created a blog theme for a documentation project as a test, but recently I received a new project on my plate, and my … more »

Our Intermountain STC chapter recently did something different for our meetings. Instead of the monthly meeting that takes place at an always-distant location in the evening, we held a half-day event on a Friday afternoon with three presentations in a row focused on a theme. Surprisingly, it worked quite well. We had probably double the number of people who normally attend our evening meetings. I’m … more »

My wife Jane attended a Segullah writer’s retreat conference this weekend. During the conference, one of the presenters explained a common mistake many novice writers make: they look for stories to fit a pre-selected theme. You hear the result of this strategy most commonly in church talks. Someone is assigned a topic, or has a topic he or she wants to explore. To make the … more »

If you know me, you know that I love WordPress. Which is why this post may seem a bit odd to you. Lately I have been exploring BlogEngine as a possible web platform for help. BlogEngine? That little startup blog platform that runs on .NET and Windows? Yes, I will explain in a moment. But first a quick recap on where we are in the … more »

In the unfolding saga of inline links within posts and the decline in readability that these links bring about, Adriel Hampton’s post helped me persuade me more to this idea. Hamptom quotes from Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. Carr writes, (In a 2001 study) one group read (a short story) in a traditional linear-text format; they’d read … more »

Lavacon is a yearly conference Jack Molisani puts together on professional development for technical communicators. This year’s conference focuses on social media. You can’t run a conference on social media without having a cool-looking social media driven website, right? So Jack contacted me to help make the Lavacon conference site more of a web 2.0 / social-media-driven experience. Working on the Lavacon conference website has … more »