I attended the latter half of the RoboHelp 6 webinar from Adobe today. I learned about the webinar on Scott Abel's excellent and always timely blog, The Content Wrangler. First I have to say that I was both impressed and frustrated by the RoboHelp webinar. I was impressed by the new RoboHelp features — the simple ability to identify conditional tags at the topic level, the integration of Captivate, the launching of a new screen capture pr...
I just listened to the latest podcast from DMN Communications. In it, Scott and Aaron talk about how to deal with documenting bad software. They asked for listener feedback, so I'd like to offer my opinion. First let me explain their question. They ask what you should do when the application you're documenting is backwards and non-intuitive, and your suggestions for UI and other design changes have been disregarded. Scott and Aaron explai...
WordPress 2.1 offers some major new enhancements that I would like to touch upon here. I think these enhancements are the best thing WordPress has done in a while. Import/Export and the Zen of the Free In a podcast titled the Zen of the Free, Simon Phipps — chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems — explains that open source content only has appeal if you can get your data in and get your data out. Users want to be like butterflys, t...
This NPR story of the day hit home. It's about how teens stay up too late because of the Facebook, MySpace, instant messenger, and other web allurements that are so enticing. Then they wake up in the morning and check their e-mail and poof, an hour goes by and they're already late for school. I often have the same problem -- so my wife has taken the role of the bedtime enforcer. At 9:45 p.m. she turns the computer off for me. My life is s...
The Curse of Knowledge is a concept in a book called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. The curse of knowledge concept has generated quite a bit of buzz. Here's an excerpt, which I got from 37 Signals: People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads o...
A couple of weeks ago, Rhonda recommended Boagworld as a good podcast to listen to. If you're into web design, I also recommend this podcast, particularly the episode on Community Websites. This episode has two parts: Part 1 Part 2 Paul mentioned a few interesting points about communities: Users who can participate and contribute to your site feel more loyalty and belonging to your site. The comments and information they add can also ...
Listen here: Thom Haller, information architect and director of the Center for Plain Language, talks about how to create a site where users can actually find the information they're looking for. Specific topics in this podcast include: The GECKO method (Gather, Evaluate, Chunk, Know, Optimize) for organizing content for websites Arranging information based on user tasks Clarity traps such as familiarity and clutter Meas...
I just posted a podcast with Thom Haller on Tech Writer Voices. It's an interesting podcast, with the central focus on organizing your site's information around tasks the users want to perform. We write help documentation the same way of course, but I hadn't really thought of applying the same principles to a website's information. I haven't yet applied the GECKO principle Thom talks about to my blog or podcast, but I plan to. With Tech ...
Big news in the WordPress world -- 2.1 has been released. I think we've been waiting about a year for this major upgrade. You can download the release from WordPress here. Here's an excerpt from WordPress about what this release includes: Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again. Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post. The lossless XML import and export makes it ...
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."
