This post is part of a series that explores tech comm trends that I've either followed or forgotten, and why. The overall goal is to better understand the reasons that drive trend adoption or abandonment in my personal career. This post focuses on quick reference guides.
This post is part of a series that explores tech comm trends that I've either followed or forgotten, and why. The overall goal is to better understand the reasons that drive trend adoption or abandonment in my personal career. This post focuses on screencasting.
This post is part of a series that explores tech comm trends that I've either followed or forgotten, and why. The overall goal is to better understand the reasons that drive trend adoption or abandonment in my personal career. This post focuses on faceted filtering.
This post is part of a series that explores tech comm trends that I've either followed or forgotten, and why. The overall goal is to better understand the reasons that drive trend adoption or abandonment in my personal career. This post focuses on wikis and crowdsourcing.
This post is part of a series that explores tech comm trends that I've either followed or forgotten, and why. The overall goal is to better understand the reasons that drive trend adoption or abandonment in my personal career. This post focuses on help authoring tools and single-sourcing.
In this series on trends to follow or forget, I look at about 15 different trends that I've explored in my career as a technical writer. I divided up the content into individual articles to facilitate easier navigation and browsing.
I recently chatted with Bobby Kennedy to learn more about the technical writing courses he's offering at becometechnicalwriter.com. In this podcast, he shares a bit about why he started offering technical writing courses, some of the activities and strategies in the courses, and the outcomes so far.
My multimodal commuting strategy involves taking a car + train + bike to get from my suburban location to downtown Seattle. In this post, I share some tips and strategies for each of these segments.
Archbee.io is a new online documentation platform with a lightweight, fast editor that makes it easy to write and manage documentation, knowledge bases, or other company information. Archbee has some unique features that make it worth exploring — especially if you create web API or GraphQL documentation. Their editor is one that you can easily fall in love with and is the centerpiece of the product. The whole authoring platform feels extremely responsive, modern, and web-friendly. If you're shopping around for documentation tools, I definitely recommend checking out Archbee.
Despite the failure of these doc reports and meeting notes formats, I hardly fault myself. I was simply following the same conventions that nearly any group does inside the corporation — stuffing all updates into a long email and blasting it out. Different spaces have different communication mediums, and inside the corporation, this was the expected form and delivery.
I recently gave a presentation called How to increase awareness of tech comm inside corporate walls at the MEGAComm 2022 conference, which is a conference for tech comm professionals in Israel. The recording, slides, and description of my presentation are available below.
I recently updated the Metrics and measurement section of my API course to remove the section on scoring the various API documentation criteria. I also consolidated the first- and second-level checklists into a single checklist.
Recently I posted a short survey trying to identify trends that faded or fizzled. About 300 people took the survey. As I was creating the survey, I thought there would be some clear trends that failed. To my surprise, I learned that anything that once surfaced as a documentation trend is still "hanging in there" as a common practice in the field. About the only thing you can say is that tech comm has become more fragmented, plural, diverse, and multifaceted than ever. There are superseded technologies, but apparently no non-trends.
In preparation for a presentation on trends that fizzled or faded, I launched this short survey to get some help in identifying fizzled trends. The survey is still open (so feel free to take it), but I'm not longer actively monitoring the results. The survey is here. The survey has you rank the trends using sliders.
'Using MadCap Flare to Generate API Documentation' provides an excellent introduction to API documentation, along with an example implementation in Flare. This webinar, hosted by MadCap Software, was presented by Athena Adiksson and Jana Cromer of VAS. The webinar focuses on the basics of API documentation content, not necessarily on OpenAPI specifications or integration. VAS provides a farm management API. You can view the recording here. (Note that MadCap Software is one of the sponsors of my site.)
