I'm proud to welcome another sponsor to the Tech Writer Voices podcast: MadCap Flare. You may be wondering exactly what sponsorship involves. Basically, it's different for each company, but I'm offering promotion on my podcasts in exchange for a free copy of the company's product. This is actually something that Heidi Hansen, my co-host, encouraged me to do long ago. So for the past week, I've been exploring MadCap Flare Version 3.1 with ...
I listened to virtual rain fall for several hours today, trying to determine whether the pitter-patter of the falling rain is, as the Writer's Mind CD says, stimulating the Alpha waves of my brain and causing my motivation and creative synapses to fire with extra pep as I write. Honestly, I can't tell. The Writer's Mind CD is supposed to stimulate your brain waves to give you both creativity (by selecting Track 1) or motivation (by select...
I listened to several excellent podcasts this week that I want to recommend to others. Networking for Freelancers, Work-at-Homers, and Other Professionals In this podcast on networking by the STC Washington D.C. chapter, Carolyn Kelley Klinger interviews two experts on the value of networking. Although I've never been aggressive in my networking, this podcast made me realize that my blog and podcast are infinitely valuable networking tool...
You might get a kick out of this. I asked a couple of questions to Charles Stricklin at the WordPress podcast, and he answered my questions in his latest show (fast forward to the 40 minute mark). My questions aren't so interesting, but rather the way he handles the mention of my podcast URL, idratherbewriting.com. What seems to be a completely straightforward term suddenly brings a sense of confusion and hesitance to Stricklin and his co...
Upgrading WordPress is a pain -- backing up your database, downloading the latest zip file, deactivating plugins, deleting old files, uploading new files, running update scripts, reactivating plugins, etc. That's why when non-major releases like 2.3.1 come around, I often look to see if upgrading is actually worthwhile. All that has changed now. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin performs all of the steps automatically, allowing you t...
In this iinnovate podcast, Marissa Mayer -- Google VP of Search Products and User Experience -- talks about the innovation and methodology behind some of Google's products. What's most interesting is the story behind Gmail, specifically how Marissa almost killed its ad integration. Apparently one of the coders -- despite the request from Marissa to stop trying to integrate ads -- stayed up all night (literally until 7 a.m.) finishing the ...
I read an essay by Alan Shapiro last week titled "Why Write?" In it he summarizes a letter from Elizabeth Bishop that provides a thought-provoking, unique reason for writing. Here's the passage: Elizabeth Bishop provides a possible answer [for why we write] in a famous letter to Anne Stevenson. Bishop writes that what we want from great art is the same thing necessary for its creation, and that is a self-forgetful, perfectly useless conce...
I listened to STC Atlanta's recording of Allison Reynold's talk on job skills for the workplace and what universities should be teaching tech writers. Three ideas struck me during the presentation. They may not have been her main points (there was a lot of audience discussion), but they were what I walked away with. 1. Employers looking to hire candidates for the long-term primarly look for assets such as business skills and leadership qu...
When I woke up this morning, I reread the latest STC email, which said although the deadline for proposals to the next STC Summit is today (Friday, Oct 19), they won't actually download the proposals until Monday morning. This is an indirect way of giving people the weekend to finish their proposals, and also a hint that they want more proposals. (Perhaps after the low acceptance rate from last year, many people were intimidated from reap...
If you use WordPress and want to streamline the process for responding to comments, check out the Better Comments Manager plugin. You can respond to all your comments directly from your admin console interface, rather than responding in the comments section below each post. This is one of the more useful plugins out there. Here's a screenshot of the Better Comments Manager interface:
Listen here: In this podcast, Anne Gentle, author of The Quick Web for Technical Documentation, tackles some of the toughest questions about wikis, such as, How do you reuse and possibly single source your wiki content? If only 1 percent of your users contribute, is the wiki even worth it? How do you deal with the lack of a robust style editor in a wiki? What should you do when you do not like a user contribution? Addi...
At the last STC Summit, I ran into the legendary Ann Rockley and interviewed her briefly about the goings-on at the Rockley Group. One of the new projects she mentioned was the upcoming launch of their stylishly-designed blog. I asked her if blogs were becoming an expected norm, and she said that yes, People expect to see a blog, they expect to see information provided in this way. Ann and others at the Rockley Group are interested in co...
I published an article in TechCraft last week called "Should You Sit Near SMEs?" TechCraft is the eNewsletter that accompanies the Technical Writers of India (TWI) mailing list. If you already have a Yahoo ID, here's the link to the article -- scroll down to the September 2007 PDF copy. It's in the "Legally Bland" section. (I'm still not sure what this section title could possibly mean, but it's where my article is.) In case you can't acc...
I've been waiting for tags to come out for a while. Now that WordPress 2.3 (Dexter) is here, I'm trying to integrate them into my site to the fullest extent. The following image shows the new Tag field that appears below posts. Tags vs. Categories First, to get the concept of tags right, think of tags as index words, and categories more like chapter headings. Lorelle explains, Tags are like your blog's index. They are keywords that repre...
Tibu Puiu from the Lost Art of Blogging asked me to check out his post on the "7 Blogging Beginning Mistakes and How to Avoid Them." Although I agree with much of what he says, I've decided to play devil's advocate here and see what counterarguments I can find against his points. I've listed Puiu's headings below followed by my counterarguments. 1. Not blogging on self-hosted blogs. Puiu's argument is that freely hosted blogs such as with...
