Listen here: In this podcast, Karen Bachmann, manager of the Usability and User Experience SIG, provides an overview of the user-centered design process. This is part one of a two part series. More specifically, she describes the following: How usability is defined Typical steps in the usability process Fitting in usability with a typical development life cycle User analysis User interface prototypes Usability test pla...
Update: For steps on removing the Skype-Firefox extension, see this post from howtogeek.com. Skype 3.0 has just been released. An interesting feature is the Skype extension for Firefox. When you browse a website and see a phone number on the site, the Skype extension automatically converts it into a button that you click to call the person using Skype. Unfortunately, with Skype 3.0, calls to cell and home phones now cost money. Here's a p...
This is my first post from Word 2007. In creating a new document, you have the option of writing a blog post. I think that is about the coolest thing in the world. I was actually seeing testing out Word tonight to see if the numbering structure fixed the numbering problem when generating a print output from RoboHelp. Nope, but I'm pretty sure the problem is with RoboHelp rather than Word. Here's a little formatting. Wow, Word 2007 is amaz...
If you need a free tool to open zipped files, tar files, or other types of compressed folders, and to likewise zip folders yourself, check out 7 Zip. I've been using it for a month now (after my Power Archiver trial ended), and I've found 7 zip does everything I ever need it to -- and it's free. Here's their site: http://www.7-zip.org
Word 2007 is available. It looks quite interesting -- definitely different. Here's a post from the Microsoft Team blog about it, with a demo video. Be sure to watch the video. I haven't experimented with it yet, but hope to soon.
I've been trying to figure this out for about two days, so now that I've actually gotten it to work, I'm posting the instructions here. I'm planning to go back and revise these, but for now, proceed with caution. They're probably not that easy to follow without screenshots. We have a lot of Wordtemplates that developers use in the software methodology process. The documents all have embedded help, but that makes the document actually qui...
This video gives instructions on uploading videos to youtube, but it's mostly humor, and only a little bit of instruction. Makes me think that the instructions I write are far too dry, serious, and boring.
If you have a traditional website, you can still create an RSS feed for it. The feed file is incredibly simple -- see this site: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2175271 Basically the RSS files consists of just a few tags: title, description, and link. Each of these three tags is nested in an item tag. All the items collectively are nested in a channel tag. And then there are some generic statements at the top, and a closin...
Keith Hoffman, president of the Four Lakes STC chapter in Madison, Wisconsin, interviews Susan Burton, the executive director of the STC. Susan discusses the big things happening with STC, gives an overview of the annual conference in Minneapolis, and shares her view on the future of the technical communication profession. Specific topics include: The upcoming STC conference in Minneapolis The conference's emphasis on value for advanced ...
If you ever need to find out exactly where an IP address is located geographically, this is an amazing tool: http://www.ip-adress.com/. I think it's a mashup of Google maps and some kind of IP address database. This removes some anonymity from the web, but is convenient in tracking things.
Listen here: In this podcast, Ann Rockley, president of the Rockley Group, talks about Web 2.0 trends, content management systems, and DITA. Specific topics include: Web 2.0 trends for content management Customer-centric content management Card sorting and user-driven architecture Content-rating features and dynamic delivery Helping users find information in a CMS What DITA is and why it important Who DITA is right for ...
I just posted a new podcast. It's all about web 2.0, DITA, CMS, as explained by Ann Rockley. Check it out at www.idratherbewriting.com. Also, if you're still manually downloading podcasts, check out this list of podcatching applications.
Thanks to Beth for sending me this article on podcasting. It covers some of the big issues -- monetary ROI, audience size, purpose. It's a good read. Link to the article. I know podcasting has a poor monetary model right now; that's probably why it hasn't taken off as much. Plus so few people listen to them. I've listened to Diggnation and Dawn and Drey. I really like Diggnation -- the other week I was running on a treadmill and I just k...
It looks like Wordpress will finally be offering an enterprise edition comparable to Movable Type's enterprise edition. Cool. Here's the link to the article.
Listen here: Emma Hamer, a performance improvement consultant in Vancouver, Canada, explains how to move your performance up to another level by setting up the ideal collaborative workspace, overcoming team members' fears of change, and addressing other common problems in the workplace. In this podcast, she covers the following: Helping writers cope with major changes (such as implementing a CMS) Understanding the diffe...
