LunarPages -- one of the coolest web hosts around -- has just sponsored the Tech Writer Voices podcast with free web hosting. We've used Lunar Pages with the Suncoast STC chapter site for 3 years and for the Tech Writer Voices podcast for the past year. They've been an excellent web host that I wholeheartedly recommend. LunarPages has a Star-Trek parody audio commercial that I just integrated into the latest Tech Writer Voices podcast. E...
Listen here: In this podcast, Microsoft Usability Researcher Hugh McLoone talks about Microsoft's Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. Hugh originally gave this presentation to the Puget Sound (Seattle) SIGCHI group on January 25, 2007. SIGCHI stands for Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction. Heidi, who attended the presentation, says, "As you'll hear, Hugh was a driving force behind the ergonomic keyboard....
The OneClick installer plugin from Anirudh Sanjeev won the recent WordPress plugin competition. It may seem hard to believe, but after you install the plugin and its associated Firefox extension, installing a plugin only requires you to right-click the plugin's download link and select OneClick Install > Plugin. Then voila, OneClick automatically installs the plugin and only needs activation from your plugin page. It works similarly fo...
You've probably heard the latest tech news: Google launched its presentations tool WordPress 2.3 was released, offering tagging Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350 million Adobe announced a tech comm suite of RH, FM, Capt., Flash, and Acrob. AuthorIt released a new version (not sure what it offers) The One Child Per Laptop (OCPL) program is underway The Tech Crunch conference announced tons of new products Sketchcast was released, and Ideablob,...
A listener to the Tech Writer Voices podcast suggested I do a podcast on the following: Give ideas to people who are just starting out in technical writing. What is the base of knowledge that every technical writer should have? And so in preparation for the podcast, I offer these five skills or characteristics as absolute musts for the technical writer: 1. Facility with technology You have to be somewhat technical, although there are man...
My article, "Top 5 Podcasts for Technical Communicators," appeared in STC's Intercom today. It's in the Cut & Paste section here (stc login required). I didn't have a lot of space to expand, so I thought I'd take the liberty here. First, settling on just 5 podcasts was agonizing and I thought about it for weeks, constantly drawing up lists and ranking them. I actually submitted 10 podcast recommendations, hoping they would say okay we...
Sports doesn't always parallel life, but here's one that's relevant for the season. Although penalties in football are usually looked upon as costly mistakes, they can actually be a good thing -- they demonstrate aggressiveness. Holding back your players into a passive, milquetoast attitude can be worse than racking up a half a dozen penalties. Aggressiveness also happens to be an important quality for technical writers, even if it also r...
Listen here: In this carcast, I deliver a 20 minute monologue about the best way to get information from SMEs: sit by them, permanently if possible. Many IT organizations station the writer remotely from the developers, programmers, and other SMEs, but nothing could be more damaging to getting the information you need. Increasing your proximity also increases the communication you receive. Music is from 37Hz. More about...
One of the blogs I enjoy reading is Beth Long's Spork in the Road. Beth, who I knew from the Suncoast chapter, is interested in the intersection of the creative and the technical. As I remember, she was writing a novel when I left, and was very focused on it. She also had a very enviable job creating fictional text for an online game. Here's an excerpt from her latest post: Optimism afflicts me in both my worlds, web development and ficti...
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...
