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 ...
Palimpsest: This is the future of technical communication. Sarah O'Keefe explores an ethical dilemma about including potentially dangerous information in documentation (even if it's accurate). Her post made me reflect. Fortunately, I don't document anything that has any impact on one's life (except death by boredom in a meeting).
If you have a way of tagging or marking the good content you read online -- such as adding it to a specific category on your blog, bookmarking it through Delicious, or putting the link on some other online site -- send me the RSS feed for it, and I'll add it to the Yahoo Pipes aggregated feed that I have going with Writer River. Here's what the Yahoo Pipes feed looks like at the moment. "Writer River Yahoo Pipes feed It's simple compared ...
Secrecy versus openness in communication. Gerry McGovern makes an interesting comparison between Apple and Microsoft when it comes to secrecy and transparency. Although many people love Apple and find their applications simple to use, they are not a very transparent company at all. They maintain absolute secrecy until the day of release. Not so with Microsoft.
Write Articles, Not Blog Postings (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox). I saw this link from Ivan Walsh. Jakob Nielsen argues that you should write long, in-depth articles on your blog rather than short posts that mostly link to other blogs. If you publish articles, you provide value to your readers and better establish your brand.
PDF Manuals: The Wrong Paradigm for an Online Experience This is definitely one of the must-read posts of the week. In it, Michael Hughes argues that the PDF manual is a relic from another format (the book) and has no real place on the web as the only form of documentation.
Can You Get Fit in Six Minutes a Week? - Well Blog - NYTimes.com. This article will blow you away. Don't have time to work out? If you go down to the gym for 2 minutes at lunch and bike or run as fast as you possibly can, the effect will be the same as working out for an hour or more. I'm totally going to start doing this.
