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Arrrrrrr, mateys!
I haven’t been churning out blog posts for a while due to a crazy birthday party incident. I don’t usually tell personal stories on my blog, but I thought I’d personalize this tale and talk about how grateful I am for how it is turning out!
The order of events went something like this:
Party
Saturday early evening. Arrived at large jumping inflatables party place for a five-year-old’s birthday party. Remarked offhandedly to my husband, “I always get pinkeye after going to these types of places.” Boy was that a premonition.
Got a front-row seat to the beating up of a large Darth Vader piñata with a wooden stick.
On the very last blow, just when the payload fell out of Darth Vader, the piñata bat slipped out the 10-year-old’s hands and hit me in the eye and my son, who was sitting in my lap, in the stomach. Ouch hardly begins to describe the incident!
Ouch
Organized chaos ensued and somehow I managed to bleed on other moms, not on myself. My kids were shook up but fine, the party-goers were ushered to a party room for pizza, and we made arrangements for our children, started icing the cut below my eye, and my husband and I took a trip to the nearest hospital.
Hospital Trips
After it was apparent that no eye doctor was answering to their informal on-call arrangement, I was transported to a teaching hospital about an hour away by ambulance. My husband went home to get our kids to bed, another mom slept on our couch to stay with our kids, and my husband drove to the second hospital an hour away.
The continued evaluations and a CT scan revealed that I had an orbital blowout fracture, a hyphema, a cut requiring two stitches in my upper eyelid, and a cut below my eye that was glued back together. All this from a wooden dowel rod flung about 20 feet!
Recovery
But I’m feeling much better this week and I am so grateful to get my eyesight back that I really don’t care about potential scarring or pirate eye patches. My energy level is still pretty low, which I’m not accustomed to at all. I need to sleep eight hours? What?
Apparently I will slowly regain all my eyesight as the blood in my eye gets filtered out. Day by day it improves and I’m amazed at the way the body heals itself. I’m down from three sets of eyedrops and an eye ointment to one drop at night and a clear plastic eye patch while sleeping to ensure I do not accidentally rub my eye.
Three different emergency department personnel asked if the event was captured on video! I’m pretty sure no one was rolling film or tape, thank goodness.
I got a great pan of brownies and a wonderful hand-made pop-up Get Well card from the stick swinger. He’s recovering from the incident as well and we’re all going to be just fine. Darth Vader is a crumpled mess of cardboard, as it should be. That guy really is evil.
Gratitude and Admiration
I’ve known people in the software industry who work with serious eye issues, and I have an even greater first-hand admiration for their tenacity to stick with such a visual profession.
I do try to learn as much as I can about web accessibility. I’ve participated in AIR Austin’s accessible web design competitions, judged by Section 508 Guidelines for Web Accessibility. It was quite revealing when we were told to turn off our monitors and try to reserve plane tickets!
Yet I know I can learn more and do more. Keith Soltys has a great blog entry, In the country of the blind, where he talks about not being sighted enough to drive, and gives a great example of blind Google engineer making a difference to others dealing with vision issues. I’m here as a reminder that it can happen to anyone.
How do you develop a strategic website?
My son’s preschool has decided it needs a new website. Parents and board members want an online presence that has more interaction, dynamic logins, and password-protected content. We have goals! Elementary and private schools have followed many paths to achieving their web presence including an all-parent volunteer web staff to hiring freelance web designers to $30/month services.
I wondered how these services differed from what a firm like Duo Consulting did to develop an organization’s website. So I interviewed Duo Consulting CEO and visionary, Michael Silverman. I quickly recognized that Duo’s web content strategies for businesses far outpace my preschool’s relatively static content needs. But what I also learned was that the goals of websites for many business models are often similar.
Its All About Content
What Michael told me is that websites that have a lot of changing content represent a breed of website. These may be content publishers or transactional websites. But the universal feature is that they all experience a challenge sharing their copious information online. Professional service firms, like law and accounting firms, have a lot of intellectual property that they publish on their websites. Universities, colleges and other higher education clients market themselves with their content.
Transactional websites, essentially online stores, receive considerable visibility in media coverage of the Internet. But helping organizations publish authoritative and informative content that helps them achieve their business objectives is a more challenging goal. Michael said one thing they’ve learned is that Search Engine Optimization and other traffic generation strategies is only a first step. You also need a highly usable and easily navigated site so that once visitors arrive at a site, they have a meaningful business experience.
Experience Managing Content Produces Client Dividends
With a focus on helping its client manage content, Duo has clients in multiple market including newspaper and magazines, professional services and non-profit organizations. Having experience with these industries permits Duo to more effectively scope a project when they’ve done one like it before. And they can bring best practices to the client for their particular type of business and online presence.
Having content management experience helped Duo to be chosen by the Christian Science Monitor to implement their Web-first strategy. The Christian Science Monitor intends to convert their content from a print-based periodical to a weekly web publication system. Duo has the experience with online periodicals to design and build the online interaction that they will need to be successful with this new direction for their content.
Wikis and Social Media Serve Non-Profit Organizations
Non-profits, especially those that do online fundraising, need an evolving strategic web presence to accomplish their business goals. According to Michael one of the trends Duo is seeing with non-profits and web content is a strong interest in using wikis. Volunteers collaborate using wikis when they’re on committees, they share files and communicate with the wiki. They’re also seeing much more uptake of social networking in a website’s strategy, adding functionality for websites so that people can easily form groups for discussion or common interests or other tasks. He mentioned Google Friend Connect which has been in private beta until now. It lets you add social features to your website, and indicates Google is ready to compete outright with Facebook.
When You’re Thinking About a Website Think About…
Michael said he’d like to leave people with two suggestions for strong web content – one is that a web site should have a “job description” just like any employee does. They ask people, what do you want your website to do, and how do you measure its success at doing those tasks? You may not want to set specific numbers to reach within a particular time frame, but you do want to see continual improvement.
Along those lines, he also says that you are never really done with a website. Do not expend all your energy and resources just towards a launch of a website – ensure that you can have the sustained power to see how it’s performing, then look at improvements along the way and milestones that you want to reach with your content.
Technical Writers in Demand, Mix Experience and Education Before Applying
This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of online colleges and universities. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 49,000 technical writers in the United States last year. They also say job prospects are best for technical writers over all other types of writers. So, why are so many people just coming out of college with technical communications degrees having a tough time landing that first job? It can be completely frustrating for both new graduates and prospective employers who have vacancies and feel the talent just isn’t there.
Let’s look at some of the skills and education required for technical writers and then examine why entry-level technical writing jobs are few and far between.
Some of these include:
A degree or certification in technical communications.
Often a background in another technical field such as engineering or science and may specialize in a technical area where they have expertise.
An ability to create, assimilate and convey technical material in a concise and effective manner.
In technical writing, even more than in other fields and industries, you need experience to get the job. A technical communications degree is a very good start but many companies (often led by engineers) doing this sort of hiring see writers as ill-equipped for the job and seek a more technical background to “prove” they can handle the job. Writing skills aren’t enough and even knowing the lingo and the software used are often not enough. So, what’s a new technical writer to do?
Here are some ideas:
If you can, take some engineering or computer science classes. If you’ve already graduated, take some continuing education classes to bolster your knowledge.
Offer to do a small project on spec (unpaid) for a company, or seek out volunteer work, such as documentation for an open source software project. You get a portfolio piece if nothing else and the company or organization for whom you did it may be willing to keep you around if they like what you’ve done.
If you’re a more creative type, learn how engineers work and think. They are very linear, literal and see few gray areas in anything. If you can learn how to talk to them in their language, you’ll be more successful.
Like anyone starting a new profession, you’ll need to take smaller or lower-paying jobs in the beginning as you build your portfolio and gain experience. This takes time, but if you decide you can stick it out, you’ll find a wealth of opportunities in a field that’s got nowhere to go but up.
How can we go towards documentation as conversation?
Tell me… and I will forget. Show me… and I will remember. Involve me… and I will understand.
-Confucius
Documentation as conversation means getting closer to the users and helping them perform well. Over the years experts such as JoAnn Hackos and Jared Spool have told us that this type of user-centered design and focus increases the quality of documentation.
H. Allen Brizee and Katy A. Schmaling wrote “Effective Workplace Writing” as a resource for the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL), and they say “In the last twenty years, two important ideas have developed that help professionals compose effective workplace writing: rhetorical awareness, and user-centered design.” In my mind and from what I read, user-centered design is consistently related to Web 2.0 definitions. Where Web 1.0 merely served information blindly, Web 2.0 gives users a chance to interact with the information and each other using the web.
Taking off from the concept of user-center design, I’d like to talk about how to get even closer with real customers by starting conversations and enabling user assistance in interactions with users with a series of blog entries on documentation, conversation, and community.
Professional writers have more conversation-starting tools at their disposal than any other time in history. Techniques may include the use of blogs, wikis, forums, and social networking sites, but may also involve photos, simple stick figure illustrations, videos, virtual worlds, or instant messaging. What are your thoughts on a blog series to discuss modern methods for involving readers in the conversation surrounding technical documentation?
Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) reading list
Here’s a reading list for DITA materials when you’re just getting started. I’ve been fielding some questions via email and IM about DITA lately, and pulled this blog post out of my drafts. I hope it’s helpful.
Learning more about DITA
http://justwriteclick.com/2006/05/18/learning-more-about-dita/
Getting started with DITA
http://justwriteclick.com/2007/04/12/getting-started-with-dita/
Structured writing, structured documentation
http://www.mbwest.com/Rants-and-raves.htm
BMC Case Study featured in The Rockley Report:
http://www.rockley.com/TheRockleyReport/V2I1/Feature%20Article.htm
Is DITA Going to Tip? By JoAnn Hackos in the CIDM newsletter
http://www.infomanagementcenter.com/enewsletter/200512/feature.htm
Introduction to DITA: A User Guide to the Darwin Information Typing
Architecture book by Jennifer Linton and Kylene Bruski.
Planning for DITA Success: How to Set Up the Right Team and the Right
Strategy, Part I, by Steve Manning of The Rockley Group and Su-Laine
Yeo of Blast Radius
http://www.rockley.com/articles/WhitePaper_DITA_Success_Dec05.pdf
Planning for DITA Success: How to Deploy DITA, Step-By-Step, Part II,
by Steve Manning of The Rockley Group and Su-Laine Yeo and Paul
Prescod of XMetaL
http://www.rockley.com/articles/WhitePaper_DITA_Deploying_Apr061.pdf
10 DITA Lessons Learned From Tech Writers in the Trenches
http://www.thecontentwrangler.com/article/10_dita_lessons_learned/
Updated to add:
ISTC Communicator articles about DITA (2005-2007)
http://dita.xml.org/resource/istc-communicator-articles-about-dita-2005-2007
Publish a Word outline using Author-it
At ASI, we’re working on book skeletons while we do task analysis for new documentation or feature updates that may change the way users do their work with iMIS. So, to get early feedback, we wanted a way to publish an outline of that skeleton book with no page numbers, but headings and subheading levels indicated clearly.
My first attempt at a macro called within the AfterPublish macro gave me the inverse of what I wanted (content but no outline), but my coworker Mary Connor, being the VBA expert that she is, came up with a working macro. It basically says, if you’re a section break after the 2nd section break, throw that content away but keep the table of contents content.
Here is an overview of the steps to get an outline out of a book made in Author-it.
These are pre-requisites to the publishing step:
In Author-it, create a six-level TOC object that doesn’t contain page numbers. Six was the number of levels we thought was an extreme case, and you can’t go higher than six levels of heading in HTML anyway, so six seems like a good number for us. Your situation may vary.
In the .dot file that contains your AfterPublish macros, create a TrimToOutline macro that contains this code:
Sub TrimToOutline() ' ' Freezes table of contents field, then strips off everything after the contents: ' Macro recorded 6/26/2008 by Mary Connor Dim dSection As Section Selection.WholeStory Selection.Fields.Unlink For Each dSection In ActiveDocument.Sections If dSection.Index > 2 Then dSection.Range.Delete End If Next End Sub
In the Sub AfterPublish() area of your Word template file, put a call to TrimToOutline.
In Author-it, create a new book template for outlines, and point it to the .dot file that contains that macro code above.
Next are the steps for publishing your sub-book content to a Word outline-only document. It’s not actually in the Word outline view, but rather, a table of contents without page numbers, but based on the skeleton sub-books placed within the book you’ll create below.
- In Author-it, create a book using the outline book template that you created previously.
- Drag any sub-books into this new book and save the new book.
- Publish to Word.
The resulting Word document should contain only a title page and a table of contents.
I’d love to hear feedback or ideas for improving this specialized output for Author-it, so please feel free to comment.
The art – and instinct – of productivity
I just completed David Allen’s excellent book, Getting Things Done:The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I found that some of his tips I do instinctively, yet perhaps not yet naturally, but this book helped me apply practical principles to time management. Plus, he shows us that it’s not always easy to get to “what is the next action?” in collaborative environments. Much discussion may go into that very question.
I love to be very busy, and the Getting Things Done book helps me realize that I’m as busy as many others, and perhaps less busy than some. He even says that you can have as many as 50 Next Action items on your list when you combine work and home actions and projects. What a relief it was to read that! I’m not overly busy or scheduled, I’m merely able to write down what it is that needs to happen next. I also found it a relief to keep all home and work action items in one place.
My favorite description of the natural instinctive planning process that some people can hold in their brains comes from This Woman’s Work, Dawn Friedman’s blog. She’s a writer and mom in Columbus, Ohio. The post is titled “Life inside my head” and my favorite sentence has to be this:
“Then there’s baby wardrobe — if I use the really good all-in-one dipe to take her to grandma’s then I won’t have it for the playdate tomorrow, which is ok except the other ones are a wee bit leaky so I should use the regular poofy diapers and then I’ll need to put her in the other outfit with a big enough tush but that one is maybe a tad too warm so I better check the weather forecast before I make a move at all.”
Sheer parenting inventory time management awesomeness. What are some of your favorite examples of extreme time and resource management?
Check her out!
Here’s my interview for GirlStart, highlighting a technical communication career for the “Check her out!” section of their website. The toughest question for me was the last one! GirlStart is a non-profit based in Austin that empowers girls in math, science, and technology. I was pleased to be able to say what a great career information development is, and also reading the other interviews was an inspiration to me!
So, here goes.
Title:
Senior Technical Writer, blogger
Company:
Advanced Solutions International and JustWriteClick.com
What do you do and what are some of your job responsibilities?
I write online help, website information, and user manuals for software that people use to run associations, non-profit organizations, and faith-based organizations. Our software can conquer mailings, large events, fundraising, organize and retrieve member contact information, and handle magazine subscriptions just to name a few tasks that large organizations do for their members.
I have to learn new features of a product quickly, and analyze the tasks that our typical users want to accomplish with our software product. Technical writers are sometimes described as extremely fast learners who can also interview to get the information they need as well as a journalist. My job involves writing, interviewing, learning about users, checking the software for quality, helping improve the user experience with the product, and constantly checking the future horizon to ensure our deliverables match what our customers want.
I also write a blog about information development and design at Justwriteclick.com, and it has helped me learn so much and connect and collaborate with others in my chosen field. I started blogging for my former employer, BMC Software, and it opened doors and opportunity to me because it moved me to the edges of my comfort zones.
How did you find your current job?
I belong to a professional organization called the Society for Technical Communication, and networking through those affiliations has helped me find every single career-type job I’ve found so far. Professional networking and social networking are huge parts of job-hunting, especially for fulfilling, flexible work like the jobs I have found a passion for.
Did you learn any of your skills from school?
I’m a little unusual in that my path to technical writer started with an undergraduate degree in chemistry, where I learned a lot about scientific thinking and process. After reading the manuals in the analytic laboratory where I worked for a summer testing powder samples of infant formula, I decided to explore how those manuals were written. I discovered a master’s degree program in scientific and technical communication and learned a lot of my specific job and career skills there, but I have also had to continually educate myself and reach out to others to learn more skills, for both technical and design-oriented skills. I also read a lot – books or blogs, either one is highly useful and helpful to me. I attend presentations, conferences, and training classes as well.
What would you tell a girl that was interested in doing what you do?
Technical writing and information design are professions that a lot of women have found to be fulfilling and interesting, and for many reasons, women are prevalent in the profession. I’d encourage you to read as much as you can and practice writing because both are important skills for writing technical information. I also would encourage a sense of excitement and exploration with technology, whether it’s Webkins or a Nike+iPod running sensor.
What are some of your hobbies?
I enjoy running very much and while I’m not fast, I am consistent. I’m into running for the long term ever since I found the best running partner in a friend 30 years older than me. I also write for my blog as a hobby and explore the latest technology in social media and computers by talking to my friends and colleagues online. I read voraciously and have joined at least three book clubs in the last few years. I also enjoy kids and especially my own kids. I teach my son’s classes as often as they let me and love going on field trips, even if they’re just in the backyard with a flashlight or binoculars at night.
What is your favorite website?
My favorite website is bloglines.com because that’s where I store all my blog feeds to read, and reading is my absolute favorite pastime. Probably my favorite website to visit is dooce.com because she’s an excellent writer and her daughter and my firstborn son are nearly the same age, so much of what she writes about I’m living. Right now, I enjoy del.icio.us/annegentle because it’s where I’m bookmarking all my favorite places to read and savor later. To talk with friends and coworkers, I enjoy twitter.com and twemes.com.
If you could talk to you when you were 12 years old, what advice would you give yourself?
This is a tough question, I have to say. Don’t argue with others for the sport of it comes to mind first, because my wise sixth grade teacher wrote that in my yearbook. Secondly, you’re not fat! Looks don’t matter as much as you think, but perceptions of presence, actions, and words (written and spoken) do matter. Learn as much as you can from those more experienced than you, and learn how to listen really, really well.
Find your user’s vocabulary and use his or her key terms as keywords
I just used this “trick” to find out what job titles are relevant for some of the task analysis we’re doing while writing new materials. I think it helps you get into your user’s shoes and also realize the value that your software or hardware product brings to those who decide to become an expert user with it. Here is an example – plug in your keywords and see what you find out about your users.
- Go to Indeed.com, a job search aggregator site.
- Type in the name of the main product you’re documenting. In my case, it’s a software product called iMIS.
- Fill in a location that you think would have a lot of interest or activity around your software product. For my product, that location is Washington, DC.
Voila – look through the search results and pick out 5 keywords to use either as index entries, as role or persona names the next time you do task analysis, or sprinkle the terms liberally in the headings of your online documentation to aid in findability.
Example job titles from my scenario: database administrator, project leader, project coordinator, manager, accountant, administrative assistant, and a sprinkling of director.
If I were to subscribe to the RSS feed for this search, I’d call it yet another use for RSS feeds. For me, though, it’s a nice one-time check on the types of jobs people are trying to do with the software product I document.
Try it and let us know what you find, especially if any of it is surprising to you.
Adding Google Analytics to your Author-it generated HTML pages
I’m learning about Author-it’s HTML templates today, and how to insert Google Analytics code (or any other code, really, such as adding an automatically updating variable for “Last modified by” with user or date information.)
But my task today was to insert Google Analytics code. (As a prerequisite note, we already have all our documentation available on an external site at docs.imis.com.)
First, I created a Gmail account for our department. Next, I created a Google account. Then, I went to the Google Analytics page and signed up for an account there, entering the name of our externally-accessible documentation site.
At the end of the sign up process, Google gives you javascript code that you want to place directly above the closing body tag </body>. Fortunately, the way that Author-it sets up the HTML templates, all of your Author-it topic data is inserted at a point where the <aitdata> tag appears in your HTML template.
The HTML templates are typically stored in C:\Program Files\AuthorIT V4\Data\Templates\Plain HTML, although other types of HTML templates such as DHTML and HTML Help templates are also available. These are the files I discovered that Google Analytics needed to be installed on.
- I edited the body_template.htm file and located the <aitdata> tag. I copied the code from the Google Analytics page and pasted it below the <aitdata> tag.
- I edited the html_frameset.htm file and added the Google Analytics code in the <head> area as instructed by the Google Analytics help, which, as a side note, has a set of completely question-based articles, as in, all headings are written as a question. Fascinating. The topic is “What should I know about using Analytics with Framed sites?“
Now, republish the HTML from your Author-it topics and your Google Analytics code is available on each page. After about 24 hours we started collecting data.
Let me know your experiences using Google Analytics to monitor your user assistance site traffic – what metrics are you seeking? Are there any conversion goals we should set up? One metric I am considering is trying to monitor how often the Word .doc files are downloaded. Does anyone have tips or tricks for us?
Update: I found this blog entry, Tracking document downloads in Google Analytics, and it contains hints at what I need to do to track our Word document downloads. However, I think that this article from the Google Analytics Help, How do I track files (PDF, AVI, or WMV) that are downloaded from my site? contains the method I’ll try first.
Anne Gentle is the author of 
