Last year I worked on a news article that showcased certain technologies at my work. The news article was an assignment, the kickoff of a series of articles. I worked especially hard on it, as it was the first one to introduce the series. I came up with a sensible structure, gathered interesting facts and information, and then meticulously crafted the content. I structured the information … more »

My colleagues and I were talking the other day about where we’re going to publish some help content. The scenario we’re addressing is a project that will be translated into 38 separate languages. Additionally, there are 28 roles for the system. This means there would potentially be 1,064 outputs (38 x 28), assuming help is to be specific to each user’s language and role. This is a … more »

Recently I’ve been playing more of a blogger role at my job, doing more user awareness than user education. This will only increase during the coming months, and if I do a good job, I might finally show the importance of this neglected role. Part of the reason we’re doing more user awareness is because we’ve suddenly published dozens of new websites, tools, and other … more »

If you work in a large corporate environment, you’re familiar with restrictions about accessing production servers to make updates or additions to your help content. To touch anything on a production server, you have to go through the change release process, which requires a lot of paperwork and procedural hassle. Almost no project manager sees documentation as important enough to release a new version of … more »

In When is the Best Time and Day to Publish a Blog Post, Lorelle Van Fossen explores a question that has become increasingly more relevant to me: when to publish your posts. I definitely get more responses to posts that I publish Sunday evening through Thursday, similar to Lorelle’s experiences. Also, most of the traffic seems to come during work hours. This tells me that my … more »

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] Download MP3 Length: 9 min. In this podcast, I talk with Richard Hamilton about his new publishing imprint, XML Press. Richard started XML Press to serve the needs of technical communicators, publishing books on topics that may not get traction from large publishing houses due to the limited audience, but which perfectly fit a smaller, niche technical communication … more »

Web 2.0: The Tipping Point for XML (application/pdf)