Dilbert animated shorts from your favorite comic strips. I love Dilbert -- I never realized there were animated Dilbert cartoons. It's addictive to sit there and watch these -- watch out.
Context-sensitive help in Madcap Flare is pretty easy to set up – you just follow the steps in Flare's context-sensitive help instructions. However, there's a usability problem that you must work around for the context-sensitive help to be successful. Let me explain. When the user clicks a context-sensitive help link, a help window appears, as it should. But suppose the user doesn't close the help window, but instead clicks back to the ap...
Common questions I receive about WordPress blogs My WordPress consulting side business has been getting a lot of attention lately. In fact, I've been struggling to keep up. (I do this, by the way, mainly on the weekends.) Over the last several projects, I've noticed a common trend of questions about WordPress and blogging. Here's what everyone asks. I already have a site. How can I add a WordPress blog to it? Although it's possible to cus...
As 2008 ended, I neglected to write a year-end wrap-up post because it seemed so trendy and cliché at the time, but now that 2009 has started, my muse has been prodding me to write it. A lot of good things happened in 2008. We bought a house in Eagle Mountain, moving from an apartment to a two-story home that fits our little family of five perfectly. Shannon started blogging more frequently, writing witty, engaging posts about so many thi...
Tech Comm Toolbox
Listen here: ComponentOne recently released Doc-To-Help 2009, which introduces a complete redesign of their user interface. In this podcast, I talk with Nicky Bleiel, who works for ComponentOne, in depth about Doc-To-Help. Nicky has been a technical communicator for fourteen years and is now a director at large for the STC. I've met Nicky several times at Doc Train and STC conferences, and have interviewed her for othe...
Since I've been reading The Non-Designers Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Novice, I've started to see the importance of contrast everywhere. The author, Robin Williams, argues that contrast is one of the four pillars of design, and that most people don't include enough of it. As a result, rather than contrast, they end up with conflict. Williams writes: A design is in conflict when you set two or more typefaces on t...
Stephen Fry on the pleasure of language This podcast from Stephen Fry on language is one of the most entertaining, thought-provoking, well-read essays on language I've ever heard. In the podcast, Fry says he often encounters people who consider themselves high-minded grammarians, who assume he is on their side when they express their disgust of common grammar errors, such as "12 Items or Less" signs in grocery stories (rather than "fewer"...
How to Create Columns with CSS Float | eHow.com I see so many sites that structure everything with tables. News flash: tables are out. Divs and floats are in.
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" ...
Who is to blame? In one of Alistair Christie's recent podcasts, he interviews his 70-year-old mother about how she uses computers. Although they cover many topics in the interview, her tech guilt is the most salient part of the discussion. She blames herself for not understanding how to work computers and navigate websites. When she can't locate certain features on an interface (for example, Paypal), her first inclination isn't to blame t...
I integrated a WordPress blog into another website this weekend. The original site, pictured below, was http://tamarabonet.com. Original site (built in Dreamweaver) Here's the WordPress blog I customized (http://tamarabonet.com/blog) to look identical to the existing site: WordPres Blog (created to match original) This is my third blog design in which I ported over an existing html site into a WordPress theme. I'm getting better at it, ...
A Tech Writer's World: A Killer Manual.
Listen here: In this podcast, I interview Alyssa Fox, an information development manager at NetIQ, about technical writing in agile environments. Agile environments involve short iterations of product development, such as three to six weeks to complete a release, rather than the longer one to two years of product development before releases. Writing in an agile environment requires a different authoring methodology. On A...
Rilynn from New England writes, Tom, I notice that a lot of companies use release notes to post a list of defects (bug) that were fixed with the corresponding software release. This is something that I appreciate as a software user. I realize that I'm not the user of my company's products, though. Also, management at my company is really against adopting this practice, seeing it as "airing our dirty laundry." This bleeds over to more gene...
