Take Darren Barefoot's survey on blogging here: http://www.whydoyoublog.com/node. He's gathering info for a presentation he's giving on blogging. It's a fun survey and gets you thinking about why you blog.
I've been thinking about how simple, inexpensive ideas can be surprisingly successful. Like how Digg's founders basically started Digg with a $1,000, and converted it into a site worth millions: Kevin Rose started Digg in December of 2004 with just $1000. Today Digg is one of the biggest news sites on the Net, with over 400,000 members and over 200 million page views per month. According to this article from Business week, Digg will make ...
I've been trying to create a logo for Tech Writer Voices, but I'm not a graphic artist, so my logo looks pretty amateur. My idea is to have something like this: The above image comes from someone's Flickr stream. But instead of the RSS logo, I thought I'd put in a globe. So I loaded Google Earth, captured a globe image, and then inserted it into some headphones that I got off of Microsoft clipart. My idea behind using the...
The CEO of technorati, David Sifry, posted an interesting report on the state of the blogosphere. Technorati is the organization that most carefully tracks blogs. There are at least 57 million blogs that Technorati is tracking. The number doubles about every 236 days. More than half of the blogs are active. Technorati ranks blogs by how many people link to them (similar to how Google ranks pages too). They looked at why some blogs are ra...
Yesterday my wife needed to use the computer for a while, and since we cut our cable TV, I decided to open up the Intercom to read some of the articles. After reading for about a half hour, I thought about the differences between reading blogs and traditional print media. My conclusion: the interactive nature of blogs makes the reading experience more enjoyable. With Intercom, I first read Keith Hoffman's Web 2.0 article. It was an inform...
I'm excited to upgrade to RoboHelp 6, but would you believe that RoboHelp 6 isn't compatible with Word 2007? Oh my. I assume RoboHelp will have to offer another release fairly soon. Monkey PI has a really interesting review of RoboHelp 6, calling it "craptastic."
Snap is a really interesting new feature that allows you to see an image of a link's destination just by moving your mouse over the link. I added Snap to this site and to my podcast site. (Adding Snap takes about 30 seconds, that's all.) The following image shows Snap in action. Some think this preview is annoying, and others are really intrigued by it. I think it adds interactivity to your site and allows the reader to make smarter deci...
Ponyfish allows you to create an RSS feed for sites that don't have them. If your favorite site is constantly maintained and updated, and there's no feed for it, just enter the URL into Ponyfish, configure it a little by clicking your mouse on the site's links, and Ponyfish will create a feed for you. It's a little hard to believe that it actually works, but apparently there is quite a buzz about it. The user interface is fairly simple. ...
At the end of the day, most of my life in IT is spent in problem solving. I've come to learn a few tips and tricks about solving problems. 1. Use View > Source and right click > properties to see the parts behind the visual display. When you can locate the parts, you can often identify the particular component that is running the show behind the scenes. I did this with RoboHelp today as I was trying to hack the "traditional - no skin" the...
You can choose from a variety of blogging platforms out there (Movable Type, Blogger, Vox, Live Journal, and so on), but there's something intangibly blissful about the open architecture of WordPress. You can get inside the code and customize it just how you want it to look. Of course some customizations take longer than others. And customization can be a frustrating experience. But other times it is extremely rewarding, and even blissful...
RoboHelp 6 was launched today. Here is their list of new features. (This list is from their "Reasons to Upgrade to RoboHelp 6.") New user-defined variables Define global variables for certain text elements; change a variable once, and RoboHelp changes all other instances of this variable in your Help. New RoboScreen Capture Capture screens, edit screen captures, and export images to common file formats with the new built-in screen capture...
If you've ever tried to edit the style sheet on your blog, you probably find that it's a process of trial and error, guessing which tags apply to which content, and how much your adjustment of each tag will affect the display. You modify it, then save it and view your site. Modify it some more, view it again, etc. The Firefox Web Developer extension can make editing CSS easier. This extension installs a Web Developer menu bar into your br...
Listen here: Rahul Prabhakar talks with us today about ten lessons he has learned as a technical communicator. Rahul is an Indian technical writer living in South Korea working for Samsung. You can read more about the lessons he talks about from his ten lessons learned post. Here's a snapshot of the 10 lessons: Lesson 1: Choose the Right Words Lesson 2: Strike a Rapport with Your Audience Lesson 3: Pay Attention to Deta...
In this video, an employee becomes frustrated with the inability to do a print-screen and finds a convenient workaround. This was one of the top videos on Digg today. Although some users like to troubleshoot and solve problems, there is another class of users that have an exceptionally low tolerance for technical problems. We all have our different thresholds. Last year my wife broke our laptop by banging on it out of technical frustrati...
You may think that there's no possible way you could sit and your computer and listen to a podcast that is 1 hour and 18 minutes long, like the Platt podcast I just recommended. However, I did that today without dedicating any special time to listen to it. Here was my podcast schedule for today: Drive to work in morning, 20 minutes, listen to podcast in the car Drive to gym at lunch, 7 minutes, listen to podcast in the car Run on treadmi...
