Listen here: GUI Mags GuiMags was a vendor booth at the STC Summit that caught my attention. I'm often running into people who want me to create WordPress templates to match their websites. Creating these templates is somewhat tedious for me, and it can take 1-2 days of work and haggling with CSS to get it to look right. These GuiMags guys gave me a glimpse at a simpler model. GuiMags (graphical user interface magnets) ...
Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success challenges assumptions about innate genius and natural-born talent. Through a series of detailed examples, Gladwell explains away these gifts by attributing them to practice, timing, circumstance, upbringing, culture, and opportunity. In other words, those really smart, successful people we admire—Mozart, Bill Gates, the Beatles—weren't born with natural talent. Instead, they had the right...
Listen here: James Bond: The History of the Illustrated 007 James Bond: The History of the Illustrated 007 is Alan Porter's latest book. Alan Porter is vice president of Operations at Webworks, and I've interviewed him before about their extensive use of wikis. Obviously James Bond isn't a person that comes to mind when we think of technical communicators, but Alan explains the appeal of the Bond character from a techn...
While eating dinner at my mother-in-law's house today, I stumbled across the following curiosity in the bathroom: Manual in bathroom as reading material Kind of an ingenious strategy. A tribute to the cunning intelligence of mothers everywhere!
STC Summit in Atlanta This week I returned from the annual STC Summit in Atlanta. Every year is always a series of adventures at these conferences. I'd never been to Atlanta before. I arrived a day early, because I was originally scheduled to give a workshop on blogging, but it was canceled due to lack of participants. Attendance at the STC Summit overall was down by about 35%. I was relieved, however, at not having to put together a long...
Listen here: Ginny Redish -- Letting Go of the Words Ginny Redish has just written a new book, Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works. I had a chance to meet up with Ginny at the STC Summit and interviewed her briefly about her new book. Redish told me, "Every use of your website is a conversation started by the site visitor." Here's an extended description: People come to web sites for the content -- f...
Last month I was selected as the Personal Branding Winner of the month from Jason Alba's Jibber Jobber site. I met Jason Alba at Podcamp SLC last month and enjoyed his easy-going, confident style. He said I should be charging $250 an hour for WordPress consulting, not $75. Jason's site, Jibber Jobber, is one of the most successful career sites for job seekers and career strategists. For the past couple of weeks, I've been thinking about w...
The mindset in which most technical communicators write help is sometimes fundamentally flawed. Consider the following two stories and the different approaches and mindsets each writer takes toward the project. Story #1 Because the ACME project team is building a complex software application for a large number of users, they decide to bring in a technical writer to provide help materials on how to use the application. The technical writer...
This week I'm heading off to Atlanta for the STC Summit, where I'm giving three presentations: Introduction to Blogging: A New Technical Communicator Role. Monday, May 4, 3-4:30 p.m. (ppt | pdf) What You Learn By Watching Others Use Your Documentation. Tuesday, May 5, 8:30-10:00 a.m. This is part of the Usability SIG's "Designing and Assessing the User Experience" progression, so my presentation is only about 20 minutes long and informal...
Quick reference guides 1.0 Quick Reference Guides: The Poetry of Technical Writing 1.1 Quick Reference Guide Formats -- Tips for Finding Attractive Layouts 1.2 STC Presentation this Thursday: "Quick Reference Guides: Short and Sweet Technical Documentation" ...
Last week I gave a webinar on WordPress to the STC-Suncoast chapter. I recorded the webinar using Camtasia Studio. If you have some time on your hands (for example, if you're going on a plane ride to Atlanta and you have a few layovers), you can watch the webinar on your computer. A few notes about the webinar. First, your computer's resolution needs to be at least 1280px wide, because this is how I recorded it. Also, to watch it online, ...
John from Delaware, who has a job in technical support, asked my advice about whether he should become a technical writer. He expressed some concern about the field, explaining that since almost everyone can write, the skill of technical writing must be decreasing in value. For example, technical writing can be easily outsourced. In an economy of doing more with less, is it really a good idea to base your career in a skill that is increas...
I constantly receive questions about Google Adsense from people who just start blogging. They say things like, I want to start making some money from my blog and would like to know how to integrate Google Adsense. For anyone with the same questions, I recommend that you read Penelope Trunk's latest post, "Reality Check: You're not going to make money from your blog." She writes, Almost everyone should forget about making money directly fr...
The past few days I was camping in southern Utah at Sand Hollow State Park. When we entered the park, the ranger knew -- but did not share with us upon entering -- that the area sported some of the windiest regions in southern Utah. The ranger later explained that only three days out of the last month were non-windy. Had we known this from the start, we might have pitched our tent in a more secluded shelter. But as we had no idea about th...
Usually working from home -- telecommuting -- is one of the perks of any company job. You usually wake up later, because you don't have to commute, and you may skip taking a shower, or even getting dressed. In your pajamas, you kick your feet up on the desk, keyboard in your lap, and start fiddling around with whatever projects you're working on. For me, this is how telecommuting always starts out. But it's never how it ends. The last tim...
