After my last post in which I criticized WordPress for not hiring a technical writer to make their documentation simpler and more accessible, two things dawned on me. First, I'm an idiot for not recognizing an opportunity when it presents itself. I should write a comprehensive help file on WordPress and sell it. I'll work on that. Second, the interplay between simplicity and complexity is what technical writing is all about. Although simp...
Jane has wanted to implement something like Dooce's Daily Chuck, where a new picture appears every day somewhere on the blog but not in the feed. The picture is usually just that -- a picture, without much else. It works well to draw people to your site each day, knowing that you have something new. For the past two weeks I've been trying to figure this out without much success. But I did come pretty close to achieving it. See the final e...
For a company that recently secured $29 million in funding, has grown from nonexistence to worldwide popularity in just four years, and which has the reputation of being the platform for serious bloggers, it's kind of bold for me to call attention to its biggest mistake in a post. But I'm convinced that it's a huge miscalculation on the part of Automattic (the company that leads WordPress). The Automattic team, led by Matt Mullenweg, has...
A reader asks, I caught your blog online and have been enjoying reading through the posts. I was wondering if you came across any information regarding creating usable online help for touch-screen applications. I found one article that talked about using RoboHelp to create drop-down hotspots and context-sensivitity to lessen the need for the standard clickable TOC navigation (since on a touch screen, you wouldn't have the benefit of a key...
I get a lot of questions from readers who stumble upon my blog while searching for answers to various things. I don't mind getting questions, but a lot of times I don't have good answers. I've decided to add a new question policy to my Contact page. The policy is as follows: Note: If you ask me a question, I may choose to excerpt your question and post the response on my blog. When I do this, I'll always protect your identity with a ficti...
If you have a lot of photos that you want to organize online, like this site, don't manually embed them into individual html pages. You'll either go insane or your family will leave you. Instead, use the NextGen Gallery plugin (and a WordPress self-hosted blog). The NextGen Gallery plugin allows you to upload zip files of photos in one batch and arrange them in galleries and albums so quickly it'll feel like cheating. (Here's an example o...
You've probably heard the saying, when you don't feel like praying, pray. When you don't feel like serving, serve. Feelings follow actions, so as soon as you start doing something, eventually you start feeling the desire to do it. But is the same true for blogging? If you don't feel like blogging, is it time to blog? This past couple of weeks I haven't felt much like blogging or podcasting. Not sure why. I spent a good chunk of time doin...
Sebastian asks, I have been searching the web for information about how to divide workload among writers as the the workload--and the department itself!--grow. I am thrilled to find your blog! I am a new writer in a Health Information Systems doc group. We write for 120 products, maintain 600+ documents (several output formats). Do you know of any effective strategies/tools/medications? What kind of documents do you produce? We produce o...
Jane made this cool little Venn diagram the other week. It's intriguing and feels true, but it's meaning seems just out of reach. What do you think it means?
In the on-screen text in WordPress, on the Write > Page screen, I ran across the following help text. Just yesterday my colleague Ben was asking how I felt about the use of contractions in help. Contractions? We've moved far beyond contractions. We're now using terms like janky. How I would love to publicly insult the applications I document! E.g., Hey, we know this feature is kludgey, but we couldn't find an easy fix. Hang on -- the ...
WordPress Training Course Date: Saturday, July 19 Time: 9 am to noon MST Cost: $99 If you're interested in WordPress training, I'm holding a course this Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon MST over the web. Click the WordPress Training button on my navigation bar for details about what's covered and the cost. Speaking of WordPress, here's a great post from Mashable about 20 must-have compatible plugins for WordPress 2.5. I especially recommend ...
Jan 2009 Update: Please see the note at the bottom of this page. Because I had trouble using captions with the Photojar plugin, I deactivated the plugin. A WordPress image gallery allows you to create a sharp-looking presentation for your photos or images. With just a couple of plugins and tweaks and some basic understanding of the WordPress gallery tag, you can make a Lightbox/Slideshowesque display of your gallery images without any cus...
Woopra is a new website analytics tracking tool that gives you enough live stats to write a dissertation. It takes analytics tracking a step further than Google Analytics and allows you to see a live map of visitors on your site — what they're reading, what paths they've taken, what country they're from, how long they've been on your site, and so on. If visitors have left a comment and haven't cleared the cookies in their browser, they ev...
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" ...
I wrote this post for Poewar.com last year, but I like to keep my own writing consolidated on my site, so I've added it here. Literary nonfiction gets its energy, Richard Locke says, from the intersection of the personal and professional. The tension and appeal of literary nonfiction comes from the interplay between the writer's personal experiences and the topic he or she is exploring. Richard Locke headed the Literary Nonfiction Writing...
