InDesignSecrets » Learn InDesign One Feature at a Time. The author recommends setting aside 15-20 minutes a day to learn a complicated tool such as InDesign. I couldn't agree more. The same technique applies to exercise and anything else that is overwhelming in large amounts. Approaching it little by little each day, you find that it's not so overwhelming. However, this article has an even more profound implication for help authoring. If...
Keys to Being a Trusted Source of Information: Gryphon Mountain Journals. My colleage Ben Minson reflects on one of the key benefits of engaging in social media: trust. And then he analyzes trust in relation to the help materials we create as technical communicators. "If our audience thinks about us, they likely see us as just another part of the team that develops the product. We're not their friends—we're one of the people trying to mak...
Many of you—at least a third, I'm guessing—are writers by nature. You majored in English, dabbled in creative writing, probably immerse yourself in literary novels at lunch. You love the written word. You revel in your expertise in grammar, your fine tastes in sentence structure and semantics. You proudly display your Chicago Manual of Style on your bookshelf. Maybe you even secretly want to be a novelist. Perhaps you have an unfinished m...
STC's wiki is also scheduled for demolition :: TechCommDood. I admit that while I haven't visited the STC Forums in at least a year, I am surprised to see them being taken down. I didn't realize the hosting costs were so prohibitive that it was an expense that needed to be cut. Then again, I'm not sure the STC is taking them down to cut expenses. In STC's announcement, they don't actually say why they're taking the forums down. Instead, t...
It seems most of the conversations in our industry today revolve around value. If you go to stc.org, the large graphic at the center of the site says "The Value of Technical Communication." (Given the recent events in the STC, to me the graphic really reads, "The value of the STC organization.") At any rate, technical writers have been talking about demonstrating value to employers in quantifiable ways for years. Technical writers frequen...
Rather than use Writer River as the interface for publishing links, we use Publish2, which is a link sharing platform. You use Publish2 to manage your links, and then publish your links to one of the blogs that you have configured in Publish2. You can add multiple blogs and Twitter accounts to your Publish2 profile, and then publish a link to all of the sites at the same time. You just have to set up your blog and Twitter accounts in your...
Content Theory: Sheep and Chaos — MK Anderson. Keith Anderson writes about the need for technical communicators to focus on user needs and the user experience as their starting point. Does DITA fulfill this focus? Not in the eyes of the user. Users want better search and social networking.
I don't know if it was my long bike ride along a river or my immersion in the writing phase of a documentation project, but this week I've been pondering Mike Hughes' assertion that help should be a "mile wide and thirty seconds deep." I first heard Mike mention this help landscape metaphor in a podcast several months back. Mike also wrote an article called "The Help Landscape: A Mile Wide and Thirty Seconds Deep" for UX Matters a couple ...
Sometimes I can hardly believe I've gotten along for so many years as a technical communicator without a thorough understanding of Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Flash. They seem critical to technical communication. Why Illustrator With vector images (which Illustrator allows you to create), your images in quick reference guides will look sharp and crisp. The more quick reference guides I create, the more I realize how necessary images and d...
This weekend I attempted to bike to the new location that my work is moving to -- Riverton, rather than downtown Salt Lake City. It's a 15 mile commute from my house in Eagle Mountain, part of it along the Jordan River Parkway trail, which is a scenic, paved route wide enough for a couple of bikes. The idea of biking to work appeals strongly to me on several levels. If I biked 30 miles a day, I'd be in great shape. Getting more exercise t...
How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing. I saw this on Gordon Meyer's blog. It talks about how blogs and web publishing have provided venues for texts that, due to incorrect page length, wouldn't have otherwise been published. Traditionally, texts had to be either 5 pages for magazines or 200 pages for books. Blogs now allow paragraph-length thoughts or 20 pages essays. Length (either too long or too short) is no longer a deterre...
I recently helped added some map functionality to a blog focused on Bellingham real estate to give users a better sense of the various neighborhood locations in their area. I used the Google XML maps plugin because it seemed to work best, and ever since then I've been playing with Google maps. Mapping technology has come a long way in the last several years. You can now embed a rich Google map directly into your blog or site, draw boundar...
Feedburner Add Customizable Subject Lines to Email Subscriptions. Holy smokes, I've been waiting for Feedburner to roll out this feature forever. For all of your subscribed to email updates of my posts, you can now look forward to customized subject lines of the actual post, rather than just seeing the blog name.
Mind Hacks: In our wildest dreams. Okay, I realize this has little to do with technical communication, but it will change the way you view your dreams at night. Rather than escape, fantasy, or just plain nonsense, dreams are "night-time survival training." Those dangerous situations of aggression or pursuit are your body's way of conditioning a response to danger. It's your training for those really dangerous situations you might find you...
This is a guest post by Cathy Wildhaber about her experience implementing a wiki in her department. Cathy is a technical writer in Kansas City. For the past 4 years, she has worked for a company that provides computer systems and services to financial organizations. Ever take a look at some slick wiki technology and think "Wow, that's really cool…I want one"? I did, and the results (an internal wiki for the documentation department where ...
