I attended my first WordPress meetup yesterday. Here's a 20-second video that Brad Baldwin of Rocky Mountain Voices took at the event. My wife and I appear at the very end, engaged in conversation with a couple of seasoned bloggers who make their living from a quotations page that gets 200,000 hits a day. (By the way, I found this video on Janet Meiners' site (aka Newspaper Girl), who wrote an excellent post about the event.) ...
The two leading screencast tools, Camtasia and Captivate, both have strengths and weaknesses that make selecting a clear winner difficult if not impossible. But lately I've been using both of these tools and have been particularly impressed by Camtasia's zoom-and-pan feature. The new zoom-and-pan feature in Camtasia is, without argument, the most exciting feature in Camtasia. The zoom-and-pan feature allows you to easily zoom in or pan to...
Tip: For an updated perspective on this post, see Guest post: 10 New Things to Love and Hate About Flare. Madcap Flare is one of the most advanced, functionally robust online help tools for technical writers who want to single source their content. When you use Flare to create an actual project (rather than just experimenting with a trial version), you come to know the ins and outs, the major benefits and the quirks, its...
I read on Holly Harkness's blog that the 2008 WritersUA Salary Survey has just been published. Holly writes, The good news is that salaries in the United States now average $76,044, up over $2000 from last year. The bad news is the gender gap in compensation is alive and well. Men average $4000 more per year than women. WritersUA reports that the gap is growing, not shrinking. For survey details, see the WritersUA salary survey home page....
Listen here: In this podcast, I talk with Mark Hanigan, former international STC president, about ways to go beyond technical writing. I knew Mark at the STC-Suncoast chapter in Florida and often, during "post-meeting-meetings," listened to him talk about ways to transition from technical writing into tasks that companies perceive as having higher value, such as business analysis and project management. Mark strongly bel...
If you're interested in making money blogging, and you don't mind learning a bit about Google APIs and mapping, here's an opportunity worth pursuing. Studio B, a two-time Inc. 500 company and leading supplier of technical marketing content and services, is looking for developers with extensive coding and writing experience to write articles and blog posts on a variety of web services topics. Articles and blog posts will be hands-on accoun...
PodcastFAQ.com is a new site developed by Todd Cochrane of the Geek News Central podcast and several other prominent podcasters from RawVoice. PodcastFAQ is intended as a much-needed information resource for podcasters. I was exploring the site yesterday and discovered several things I was unaware of: Ioda Promonet -- a resource for podsafe music (music you can play on your podcast without violating copyright or paying royalties) Podcas...
Although it's outside my blog's focus, I'd feel remiss if I didn't express admiration for Gordon B. Hinckley, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who just passed away tonight at age 97. Much unlike a prophet of doom and gloom, President Hinckley was an optimist who encouraged us to stand taller, to take longer strides and do better. One of my favorite talks he gave was entitled "Slow to Anger." Quite amazingly, h...
Clearplay is a DVD player that filters out profanity, extreme violence, and sexuality from movies, toning them down from R to PG-13, or from PG-13 to PG (if you want). Whereas other filtering methods involve physically altering the media, Clearplay works differently. You download filter files from Clearplay's site, load them onto a flash drive, plug the flash drive into the Clearplay DVD player, select to apply the filter to the movie, a...
Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, will be at a Wordpress meetup in Salt Lake City next Saturday, February 2. Details are as follows: Saturday, February 2, 2008 12:00 PM Taj India Restaurant 3540 South State St Salt Lake City, Utah 84115 See the original announcement or the event page. I'm looking forward to this opportunity, as I've never been to a WordPress meetup.
If you're a podcaster and you live in Utah, be sure to attend the upcoming podcamp in Salt Lake City. Details are as follows: Saturday, March 15, 2008 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM Neumont University 10701 S River Front Parkway, Suite 300 South Jordan, Utah 84095 Podcamp homepage: http://www.podcampslc.org/. Original announcement: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/319547/ I'm learning that several big podcasting names are in Utah, including Phil Wind...
Interviewing experts is one of the easiest and most practical ways to generate material for your podcast. Although many people think the difficult part of podcasting is the audio setup and production, actually pulling off a good interview requires more art and skill. I know I'm not the best interviewer, but I've learned at least 10 tips from the 60+ interviews I've conducted for my Tech Writer Voices podcast. 1. Do research beforehand. Re...
Lately I've been reading Scott Berkun's The Myths of Innovation. A passage about the methods for innovation jumped out at me. Berkun writes, Many innovations start in the same way as mentioned previously [from dedicated problem solvers], but an unexpected opportunity emerges and is pursued midway through the work (p. 41). In other words, while people are pursuing one direction, they encounter a surprise that leads them down another, more ...
Listen here: Madcap Flare is one of the most powerful online help authoring tools on the market today. In this podcast, Paul Pehrson, MVP in the Madcap Software forums, talks about Madcap Flare in depth. If you create online help, this is definitely a podcast you should listen to. Paul is a really sharp guy and if you've ever participated in the Madcap Software forums, you've probably been helped by "Doc-Guy" (Paul's ali...
In the pages section of my site (upper-left corner), I've added several new features: a Google Reader blogroll, podroll, and a shared Pandora feed. This blogroll is different from the usual blogroll. This blogroll is a javascript that inserts feeds from my Google Reader. Now you can know exactly what I'm reading, and I don't have to maintain a blogroll list separate from my feedreader list. It seems that we're sharing everything these day...
