Google Reader lets you share posts from the feeds you read. Right now I have a tremendously long commute in a carpool and I started using Google Gears' offline reading for my feeds. It works quite well -- until the car starts winding around a narrow mountain road and I feel like I'm going to throw up. But for a while, it does allow me some time to check out my feeds. At the top of my blog there's a link called "shared from google reader."...
Listen here: This podcast features the June presentation that Char James-Tanny gave to the Suncoast Florida chapter on virtual ways of communicating. Char is the secretary of the STC and a well-known expert on AuthorIT, RoboHelp, and other tools. In this presentation, she talks about second life, blogs, wikis, mashups, skype, and other virtual ways of communicating. Her blog is at helpstuff.com/blog. About Tech Writer V...
If you enjoy podcasts, check out Act One of the "Devil in Me" episode of This American Life. The episode explores how Iraqi war veteran Sam Slaven returns from Iraq with post-traumatic stress syndrome and a fear of Iraqis. Just being in the same room with an Iraqi makes him start trembling and thinking of ways to remove him (for example, by "choking him out"). Sam recognizes the irrationality of his fear. After he enrolls in college, he d...
You can unsubscribe from feeds in Google Reader via the Feed Management page (see image below), but it's not the most efficient way of managing the feeds. Using this method to unsubscribe can be tedious and time-consuming, because you have to leave the page you're on and then scroll down to find the feed you want to unsubscribe from. Instead, to unsubscribe from feeds in Google Reader: 1. Assuming you're reading feeds from the All Items ...
Scott Abel's The Content Wrangler has a cool example of using AJAX (asynchronous javascript) in his blog to increase usability. Kevin Shoesmith is the blog designer behind the Wrangler's makeover. I'm really impressed by the new site design, particularly the AJAX functionality. (Here's Scott's more detailed explanation of AJAX.) Overall the site looks more professionally organized and designed than it was before. The software running The ...
After a five-month hiatus, Aaron and Scott at DMN Communications returned to the podcasting scene. In this Sep 9 podcast, they discuss whether technical writing is calling or just a job? By calling, they refer to treating tech writing as if you were destined to be a tech writer, as if it was a sacred duty you were compelled by almost a higher power to complete. Some writers exhibit this tech-writing-as-calling attitude by writing lavish...
Sometimes I would like to change my job title from "technical writer" to investigative reporter, because so often this is the task that we have. Information we need is not online, not in any documents, not even available in the application itself. We have to pry it from the minds of subject matter experts (SMEs), the techies who talk in acronyms and dream in code. Surely one of the worst mistakes tech writers can make is to just stay in t...
Occasionally people send me links to check out, and they encourage me to use them as fodder for my blog. I've let them build up a bit this past month. Here are three. (I'm copying and pasting from their emails -- I hope that's all right.) I haven't actually explored them yet, but some might be interesting. Let me know if you have any feedback. Scriblink "I recently launched a website that I think would be great on your blog. It's called ...
It's been a while since my last post. Sure I've busy with the move and new job, but I've also just fallen out of the habit of blogging. I know blogging can be evidence of an active, engaged mind, so I don't ever want to give it up. Please don't mistake my absence for a permanent vacation. I'm just in transition right now and other things are on the forefront of my life. So where has my mind been? I've been learning a lot about storage are...
I have been thinking a lot about how we accumulate an excessive amount of "stuff," which turns out mostly to be junk. I'm not afflicted with packrat syndrome. And scouting out good deals at garage sales is not my idea of a Saturday morning well-spent. In fact, I don't even have a garage, nor do I want one. Ninety percent of the people I know who own garages fill them with unnecessary items. Still, in packing and moving, I realized that we...
I know the title of this post sounds cliche, but it's how I feel. In 4 days, I'll be driving a 17 ft. U-haul towing a trailer minivan with 3 small children 2500 miles from Florida to Utah, moving into a little town, starting a new job, beginning so many things over. But during our three years in Florida, a lot happened in my life. I want to list them here so I remember. I arrived in Florida from Egypt after having spent 2 yrs teaching wri...
I used to think screenshots weren't necessary when it was obvious where buttons and other links were located. For example, if I wrote something like "Click the Subscribe to the RSS Feed link in the sidebar to subscribe to this blog's RSS feed," you'd think that people could easily follow this instruction. However, after watching user behavior, I have changed my mind. I now think screenshots are important to include even when interface el...
I'm relocating to Utah in late August to accept a new job. I'll be working for EMC, which does contracts with the army base in Dugway, Utah. Dugway is about 80 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, remotely located in the Salt Lake Desert (see image below). We'll be driving over from Florida, which is about a 2,400 mile drive. We'll actually live in Tooele rather than Dugway. Tooele ("Tuwilla") is a small town (population = 30,000) about 45...
Gigzig is a feature within Payscale.com that shows you where people with your same job title were 5 years ago, and where they are 5 years from now. It's a pretty cool before-and-after path to look at. The technical writing path is particularly interesting to follow. It seems that in five years, most tech writers either become managers or move elsewhere into IT. Gigzig explains how the arrive at this data: Every day many thousands of peop...
This tutorial on Visio's shapes from Microsoft is the best online tutorial I think I've ever seen. If I were modeling my help after a perfect example, it would be this tutorial. Here's why: It contains both audio and text. You can control the audio easily, or just read the text. Each page is short (2 minutes) so your attention span doesn't time out. While you listen to the audio, you look at a graphic that demonstrates the concept expla...
