Recently Will Sansbury and I gave a webinar to STC community leaders on chapter and SIG websites. Rather than giving a static, one-way presentation about theoretical concepts with web design, or boring people with technical details they probably didn't care about, we held the webinar more like a design review workshop, not too different from a writing group workshop. Although I spent three years in a creative writing program holding exact...
Alistair Christie recently published a podcast about Unscripted Screencasts and Flare Extensibility. In the podcast, he considers whether scripts are necessary for corporate screencasts -- a good topic for exploration and testing. But he also gets into something a little more interesting: extending Flare with jQuery. jQuery is the new Javascript. It provides smooth functionality that shows and hides components, slides objects around, and...
Date: Jan 28, 2010 Time: 1 pm EST Platform: Genysys (on the web) Cost: Free for STC members Registration required Will Sansbury and I are giving a webinar on web design and WordPress this Thursday as part of the STC Community Leaders series. In the webinar, we plan to look at about five chapter/SIG sites in depth, examining what they're doing well and how they could be improved. The sites will merely provide examples to spark discussion a...
Listen here: Lyn Worthen presented to the STC Intermountain chapter tonight on running your own business as a technical communications consultant. She covers almost everything you need to know as a consultant, including rates, billing, contracts, marketing, taxes, business structures, hours, salary, tools, locations, niche services, portfolios, client communications, and more. Here's her presentation description: Unlike ...
This Wednesday, Jan 20, there's an Intermountain STC Chapter meeting at 7 pm. in the Sandy library. Lyn Worthen will be speaking on running your own technical communications consulting business. Here's an excerpt from her description: Unlike the consistent schedule, workload, and wages of a 9-5 technical writing job, going it on your own as a consultant or contractor is a lot like riding the tide. Sometimes the tide is “in” and you have p...
In Screencasts: So what?, Kristi Leach tells an engaging story about a turnaround screencast. She explains how one good screencast can change users' attitudes about software. Here's an excerpt: I rarely watch video online. Unless it's a funny meme I have deliberately searched for, or a show that I missed, or Netflix, I won't press play. If a blog post is all video, I skip it. I rarely appreciate video instructions, either–they take too lo...
Scriptorium is presenting a free webinar on the DITA features in Madcap Flare this Tuesday at 11 a.m. EST. Here are the details: Presented by Sarah O'Keefe, this webcast demonstrates using MadCap Flare to create WebHelp from DITA-based content. Topics covered include: Importing DITA content into Flare Map file handling Cross-references and links Relationship tables Conrefs Conditional processing By the way, you can keep up with o...
To embed video on a web page, you don't need to upload your video to youtube, vimeo, or some other video sharing service. A lot of times in a corporate setting, uploading your videos to a third-party site isn't appropriate or allowed. Does this mean you have to resign yourself to a basic WMV output that opens up in the Windows Media Player? No. You can grab the embed code from Camtasia Studio's html output and copy it to a custom page to ...
In a recent design review meeting, I showed some of my screencasts to our team for feedback. We also reviewed some screencasts created by voiceover talents in our audiovisual department and screencasts created by trainers. In listening to my voice in the screencasts, it's clear that I still have a lot to learn. I'm not even close to the personal, conversational-sounding audio voice that I want to achieve. It sounds like I'm reading a scri...
A couple of months ago I created some documentation on Joomla for some web admins using Joomla to build country sites. After delivering the documentation, the users needed something more visual, so I set about creating screencasts. I created 30 screencasts to match the tasks in the documentation (which I transferred from InDesign to Mediawiki). I then integrated the screencasts with the various pages of the wiki. You can see a list of the...
Google Custom Search can dramatically improve the search results for your WordPress blog or any other site. WordPress is a great blogging platform, no doubt about it. But the built-in search feature is terrible. As I've searched for keywords from past posts to respond to reader questions, I would continually come up empty-handed. As a solution, I incorporated Google Custom Search, which is a free service that allows you to embed a Google ...
Some months ago I created a half a dozen quick reference guides for an application that would have a potential audience of thousands of users (after it cleared the beta phase). The size of the audience gave me hope that I would actually create documentation to be used by more than a handful of people outside the internal workings of my organization. I created the guides in Adobe InDesign because it seemed to make sense for the situation -...
Given that it's a new year, a lot of people are writing about trends and predictions in technical communication. Ellis Pratt at Cherryleaf has an interesting post on the Top 10 Trends in Technical Communication for 2010. Larry Kunz has a post on Technical Communication Trends in 2010. Sarah O'Keefe chimed in with 2010 Predictions for Technical Communication. And Ben Minson has Ten New Year's Resolutions. Rather than predict or comment on ...
At a department Christmas social the other week, we had a special meeting following lunch. During the meeting, people spontaneously shared their feelings about working for the Church or other thoughts they had. More than a dozen people stood up. Although it wasn't called such, the meeting was similar to a "testimony meeting," which is something that Mormons do once a month for their church meetings. During these meetings, rather than list...
One of the tough paradoxes of the technical writing field is that you can't get a job without experience, but you can't get experience without a job. Or so it seems. A reader recently wrote to me explaining how she decided to write manuals for her existing job as an account maintenance clerk, even though the task of writing documentation wasn't in her list of required duties. Doing so transformed her role. After learning more about her ex...
