White Space is a principle of layout and design well known among graphic artists, but less known and practiced among some technical writers. I have a deep interest in Web design, and white space seems to be one of the first, fundamental principles of design for both on and offline content. Paradox of White Space White space also has an interesting paradox surrounding it: The absence of graphics and text plays a significant role in increas...
Rather than having two distinct blogs -- a professional blog and a personal blog -- you can have one blog with a special hidden category that is separate from the home page and feed. The special hidden category (perhaps for personal, off-topic posts) can have its own feed and template appearance. The posts from this special category also won't appear on your home page, so your readers won't be bothered by your randomness. For example, in ...
I went fishing last night with a couple of friends down at the North Pier by the Sunshine Skyway. We didn't catch a single thing (except a tiny slender sucker fish). It was nice to spend the evening on the pier. It's so picturesque. The appeal of fishing is to be near the water. Dolphins swim around constantly in the water; pelicans fly by and crash into the water or soar like planes in the sky. I was so tired from having stayed up late t...
In an interview with Lorelle Van Fossen on adii, Lorelle says, I have a very narrow focus on Lorelle on WordPress. There are a lot of topics I'd love to cover but won't. I write about blogging and WordPress. That's basically it. If it doesn't tie in nicely, it won't go on that blog. I write very little about monetizing blogs as that turns blogs into businesses, and there are plenty who cover that market. The only time I cover that subject...
Lately I've had the urge to abandon my main desktop tools and use online tools instead. It's not just that some online tools are more capable than desktop tools, but it just feels right to be online. When you're online, you're connected, integrated, at home. The world is at your fingertips. Because of the limitations of bandwidth, I can't fully break free from my desktop, but for many applications, the potential is there. Here's how I can...
I added a new audio feature to my blog -- you can now listen to the posts. It's a robotic voice automated from Talkr.com. I thought I'd experiment with it, even though I think no human can listen to a robot-generated voice and find much enjoyment from it. However, if you're visually impaired, or want to listen to the post while doing other things, or if you're an audio learner, you might like it. There's also a voice feed (look in the si...
I stumbled across a well-designed WordPress blog yesterday. It has several qualities that make it stand out: Ample white space Simplicity of design Contrast between headers and paragraphs The ample white space and openness of the design is what I like the most. The cat in the upper-left corner (is it a cat?) and the author's picture on the right also provides a nice balance. Ample white space is a key principle of graphic design. I thi...
WordPress is already a micro-CMS, but if you have a site that has a lot of pages, it can get a bit cluttered. By CMS, I mean a site where you have an abundance of static pages that you want to manage, rather than just an endless number of posts. You can use a Subpages plugin in your sidebar to make it easy for your users to find the pages. The context-sensitive Subpages sidebar can give your blog more of a CMS feel. I just finished redesi...
This is NY Times columnist David Pogue's review of the much anticipated, over -hyped iPhone. I love Pogue's videos.
The Rise of the Creative Class is a phenomenal podcast by a world famous expert on urban economies, Richard Florida. Florida's point is that a region's economic prosperity is not based on having an abundance of companies with high-paying salaries. Instead, the prosperity depends on the degree of openness, tolerance, and quality of life in the area. So even if companies in your area offer attractive, high-paying salaries, the creative clas...
Search engine optimization helps you crank up your rankings in Google. Here are three easy techniques to make your posts land on the front page of Google's search returns: Put keywords in the title and first paragraph. Google places a heavy emphasis on keywords appearing in the title and first paragraph. The best placement is actually the first word in each. You can also install an SEO plugin in case you can't fit the keywords into the t...
Ann Gentle of BMC has been researching the use of wikis in documentation. Although wikis have been around for at least ten years, they are finally getting more attention. Ann writes, It's funny, in an early blog post I wrote on the internal blogs at BMC I said that I did not see how wikis would be used successfully for technical publications. I have since changed my once low opinion of wikis but I still see them supplementing other docum...
Listen here: In this podcast, I talk with Kevin Shoesmith about information architecture and the challenge of organizing complicated websites. Kevin explains about the importance of metadata, providing user-driven organization, taxonomy vs. folksonomy, the Dublin core, the usability of web menus. Music from Podshow. Check out Kevin's blog.
Lucy has a great smile. I wish I were always this happy, even when giants held me up.
Context-sensitive help is usually perceived as being tedious or difficult to implement. However, if you're writing help for a web application, this little javascript trick makes delivering context-sensitive help easy. Using this method, the developer doesn't have to manually configure any of the URLs, and you as a tech writer have only a minimal amount of work as well. Each page in the application calls the right help topic for the right ...
