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Entries from June 2008

Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite announced

September 26th, 2007 · 4 Comments

Adobe has announced a Technical Communication Suite, combining FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate, Acrobat 3D, and Flash, available in October 2007 for $1599 or $999 upgrade pricing if you already own one of the tools. This price point is well below what buying those products individually would cost (compare to $3600). I’m about a day late to [...]

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Tags: techpubs · tools

Author IT - boldly climbing the learning curve

September 25th, 2007 · 8 Comments

I thought I’d continue posting about my experience with Author IT since my initial review of AuthorIT. This past month I’ve been exploring ways to help out with the Author IT nuts and bolts, doing maintenance-type and infrastructure tasks such as changing the on-screen style formatting and revising a book template.
I’ve also been learning more [...]

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Tags: techpubs · tools

For those of you who want your computer to just write what you say

September 20th, 2007 · 3 Comments

I’ve been keeping an eye on the search keyword list for this blog. The hits are typically from search phrases like “technical writing” “masters degree” and “agile documentation.”
But one phrase that I found interesting was “just write what I say.” I would guess that the person is seeking voice recognition or speech recognition software, specifically [...]

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Tags: tools

The anti-social folksonomist

September 17th, 2007 · No Comments

I’m finding that in del.icio.us I’m using keywords that no one else uses. Does this mean I’m an anti-social folksonomist?
This discovery reminds me that it’s important for findability to have tags that others will use too. On sites where popularity counts, it might be better to match others’ tags depending on what your end goal [...]

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Tags: social media

Hyperviews Online article about CMS for website

September 17th, 2007 · No Comments

Here’s a link to my latest article on Hyperviews Online, the newsletter/blog for the Society for Technical Communication Online Special Interest Group (STC Online SIG). It’s called Using a Content Management System (CMS) for your STC community web site.
The STC Austin chapter is re-designing the community website, and I volunteered to help. We started researching [...]

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Tags: tools

User and task analysis - or, how do I start writing anyway

September 13th, 2007 · 3 Comments

My writing teammates and I are working through our favorite ways to start a project and do user and task analysis. The exercise forced me to write down what it is I do when starting a new project.
My formal training began in graduate school but my practical training happened at only two different companies, Rockwell [...]

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Tags: techpubs · writing

Use a blog to respond to a blog post?

September 10th, 2007 · No Comments

I’ve been diving deeper into social media and its use to make connections via email and also in real life. For example, I had a great lunch conversation with Alan Porter at Quadralay a few weeks back. We made the connection thanks to a comment conversation on Tom Johnson’s blog, I’d rather be writing. I [...]

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Tags: social media

Emerging wiki use - now and future wikis

September 7th, 2007 · 2 Comments

As you might have seen on The Content Wrangler recently, I wrote a response to JoAnn Hackos’ article, Is there a wiki in your future? and Scott Abel chose the title for my special contribution to his site. I think the title of this blog post - Emerging wiki use - now and future wikis [...]

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Tags: techpubs · wiki

Non-profit technology mashup with LOLcats

September 5th, 2007 · No Comments

I found this image on the new lolnptech site, and the site gave me a good chuckle. The cat is saying “Oh noes! Manual waz written 4 geekz not social workerz!”
This particular image hit home since I help write the manuals for iMIS. Typically our audience isn’t doing social work, necessarily, though. More likely we [...]

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Tags: nptech