I’ve been reading Sarah Maddox’s new book, Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate, and have been impressed. I enjoy the energy and speed in Sarah’s writing. If you’ve read her blog before, her book has the same tone. This is not a book review, because I’m not yet finished with the book. But it doesn’t take too many pages to come to some realizations worth noting. My … more »

This past year I learned a few things. As I approach 2012, I’d like to note what 2011 taught me: Writing documentation in a wiki suits me for the same reasons I enjoy interacting on the web. The web is interactive, alive, dynamic, collaborative, fresh, and unlimited in potential. A wiki, being online, allows me to partake in the same game-like, community-rich environment that I … more »

Last week I was feeling a bit stretched out about not having enough time to accomplish everything I needed to do. Granted, I gave several webinars to a total of 2,000 people, which was somewhat stressful, but I was more stressed about the fact that the help material I’d created could have been much better if I had only more time to focus on it. … more »

In my last series post on organizing content, I argued that traditional help authoring tools will be replaced by web platforms suitable for authoring help content. Web platforms have many advantages over help authoring tools. They provide everything from search engine optimization to interactivity and social media integration. Some of the more common HAT features, such as single sourcing and print, may not be as … more »

Yes, I am continuing this series on Organizing Content, so if you are tired of it, check back in a while. My goal is to reach 100 posts on the topic. An Electricity Fast First, a brief bit of news. All the lights in my house are off because Jane wants to do an electricity fast. It’s a Thoreauvian experiment to see what you gain when you … more »

Date: Jan 28, 2010 Time: 1 pm EST Platform: Genysys (on the web) Cost: Free for STC members Registration required Will Sansbury and I are giving a webinar on web design and WordPress this Thursday as part of the STC Community Leaders series. In the webinar, we plan to look at about five chapter/SIG sites in depth, examining what they’re doing well and how they … more »

At a department Christmas social the other week, we had a special meeting following lunch. During the meeting, people spontaneously shared their feelings about working for the Church or other thoughts they had. More than a dozen people stood up. Although it wasn’t called such, the meeting was similar to a “testimony meeting,” which is something that Mormons do once a month for their church … more »

I spent much of last week with my head inside a Mediawiki skin (when I probably should have been working on another project). I’m not entirely sure what it is, but I sometimes get fixated by technical problems I can’t seem to solve. I first customized the FraternalRelief Mediawiki skin to match my organization’s home page. My customization wasn’t too bad, but I saw a … more »

I mentioned in a previous post that I think traditional help authoring tools are becoming less and less viable for robust software projects in which multiple subject matter experts in distributed locations need to collaborate, and when these same subject matter experts need to own the documentation after release. This wasn’t just a fleeting thought. I spent the last couple of days last week getting … more »

Mary Connor talks about the latest tools for exporting documentation to wikis. She seems to prefer Webworks ePublisher for its ability to export to Confluence, a wiki that supports authoring for future releases.

Download MP3 Duration: 18 min. [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Stewart Mader was one of the coolest people I met at Doc Train West 2008. He is a person driven by his enthusiasm for wikis.

If you glance at the instructions for installing Mediawiki, it looks like you have to run complicated scripts with shell access to your server and other geeky stuff. In reality, it’s about as easy to install as Dokuwiki — assuming you have a typical hosted account, such as with Blue Host or Lunar Pages. Here’s how to do it. To install Mediawiki: The latest version … more »