One of the fundamental aspects of quick reference guides is knowing when to create them. A few weeks ago I was assigned to a small project team working on a relatively simple application, and I pitched the idea of several role-based quick reference guides for the help content. I showed samples from other projects, and the project team agreed it was what they wanted. Soon after, I started designing the help content for the application. I b...
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" ...
This article is a guest post by Daniel Ng. Daniel is part of a small team with an in-house translator. They translate their own English Flare help projects to Simplified Chinese with Madcap Lingo and have been using Madcap Lingo since version 1. Madcap Lingo -- A Fully Integrated Translation Memory and Authoring Solution Madcap Lingo is Madcap's offering in the XML-based translation authoring solution space. As a translation memory system...
CSS-Tricks #1: Converting a Photoshop Mockup (part 1 of 3).
InDesignSecrets. This is a cool site -- lots of tips and tricks if you use InDesign. And it has an extensive and regular podcast.
This week I caught up with Debbie Campbell, a Colorado web designer and developer and the owner of Red Kite Creative, and asked her about the latest trends in web design. I've been following Debbie on Twitter for a while. This week she posted a few tweets about web design and WordPress, so I asked her to share a little more. In the projects you take on, how common is it for websites to integrate a blog? Are there any trends you're observ...
The rotating flash tag cloud provides a curious approach to tags, no doubt more novel than useful, but still interesting and somewhat worthwhile. The flash cloud shows only 80 tags (any more and it's unreadable). My rotating WordPress tag cloud (click to view the flash version) You can also create a comprehensive set of tags that function as an index. Both arrangements lack usability. I'm never quite sure what to do with tags. My approach...
I'm giving a webinar on blogging tomorrow evening for the Rocky Mountain STC chapter at 7 p.m. MST. As a webinar, it's open to everyone, not just the Rocky Mountain chapter. The cost for the remote viewing of the webinar is $10. More webinar details here. To give you a little more preview about what I'll cover, here are the ten main topics: The Blog as an Expected Format Why Bother to Blog? Search Engine Optimization: The #1 Perceived Va...
Podcasts on WordPress are an excellent way to stay updated with the latest WordPress news, trends, plugins, themes, and other development. I recently discovered a WordPress podcast that I enjoy quite a bit: WordPress Weekly from the WordPress Tavern. The hosts include Jeff Chandler and David Peralty -- both knowledgeable, passionate people about WordPress and blog design and development. The two WordPress podcasts I listened to this eveni...
Jane recently changed her voicemail message to the following: (20 second voicemail) I nearly choked while laughing the first time I heard this. What she says is true. I usually end up listening to her voicemail messages for her. The proliferation of communication formats provides more possibilities for how we communicate. With all these format possibilities, we need a few best practices. As a best practice, if you're trying to maximize y...
Last week Kristi Leach wrote a tweet about the need for help to transform into a more attractive format: Kristi's tweet about the need for help to change Her tweet expresses what I've been feeling for a long time. There's a massive rift between content online and content in help files. In most help files, the content is static, old, textual, boring, unhelpful, sometimes obvious, or irrelevant, never packed with eye-candy, video, or a...
WordPress plugin that allows you to expand or collapse page hierarchies. Okay, this is a WordPress plugin that is going to be essential if you import DITA content into WordPress, because you'll have a huge hierarchy of pages that you'll want to expand and collapse. This is the plugin that will do it for you.
I know Twitter isn't for everyone (even though David Pogue on the New York Times recently praised Twitter's ability to quickly gather information from your followers.) But if you have a blog, you'd be crazy not to provide a Twitter feed for it. On my blog, I give people three main subscription options: RSS, e-mail, or Twitter. Granted, with Twitter they also get other microthoughts, but they also get my post titles. It's generally a poor ...
Can SharePoint 2007 be used as a help authoring tool? Maybe. Giovanni from Italy asks the following about SharePoint: I am assisting a colleague with a complete overhaul of an existing Help system. It is in RoboHelp, but has legacy topics that have to be maintained in Word. The Help is for call center and business office employees regarding the proprietary, in-house computer program. We recently got SharePoint, and I would like to know yo...
If you've ever uploaded a screencast into a video sharing site, such as Youtube, you'll notice that the screen quality is poor. Screencasts require a high degree of clarity to be watchable. For example, here's a screencast I uploaded to Youtube. It's hard to see what's going on. Other video sharing sites have the same problem. Here's the same video on Viddler. And here's the same video on Vimeo. [vimeo 3140858] Unlike the other video s...
