Posts Tagged ‘online help’

Does designing content for scanning devalue the content?

{ Posted on Jun 14 2009 by annegentle }
7 Comments
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Categories : social media, techpubs, tools
I just read a great post by Rajesh Setty on the Lateral Action blog called 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online. Maybe it's because I'm in the final countdown before my book is permanently affixed to the pulp ...Read More »

Casual users and Power users – what type of online help do they want?

{ Posted on May 11 2009 by annegentle }
10 Comments
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Categories : techpubs
I have been scanning through some of the presentations at the STC Summit that I had to miss due to the packed schedule, and Scott DeLoach's presentation, Best Practices for Developing User Assistance caught my eye. He has slide after ...Read More »

Examples of blogs as online help and release notes

{ Posted on Feb 05 2009 by annegentle }
5 Comments
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Categories : techpubs
I'm always on the lookout for examples of social media tools used to write and maintain online help. One trend I think I am seeing is the use of blogs as the basic release notes for new features in products, ...Read More »

Adobe AIR for an interactive children’s story book

{ Posted on Jan 06 2009 by annegentle }
1 Comment
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Categories : techpubs, tools
Storybook Anytime is a Flash and Adobe AIR website for kids to have their own stories in a library. It's a great example of Adobe AIR, a technology I'm curious about for online help use. Here's a few screenshots of ...Read More »

Can online help show “read wear?”

{ Posted on May 28 2008 by annegentle }
8 Comments
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Categories : writing
I've been re-reading Jakob Nielson's Participation Inequality essay on useit.com, and the suggestion to some how show wear marks on content struck me this evening for some reason. I guess it's because I've been working on Drupal recently, and discovered ...Read More »

Wiki as online help source

{ Posted on Apr 18 2008 by annegentle }
1 Comment
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Categories : social media, techpubs, writing
A response to the question, Wiki-to-Help? on the Help Authoring Tool Yahoo Group. One of our test engineers (and the lead developer of our company wiki) just approached me with the idea of using our company's internal wiki as the central ...Read More »

Can DITA train writers? Or does it require too much programming?

{ Posted on Feb 13 2008 by annegentle }
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Categories : writing
DITA for writers (content creators) I just did a search on amazon.com for books for beginning technical writers and also to investigate what books are being written for our profession and for others wanting to start in our profession. I came ...Read More »

Q and A about Author-it and DITA – guest post from Mike Stockman

{ Posted on Nov 29 2007 by annegentle }
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Categories : tools
I read this recent conversation on the author-it-users Yahoo Group with interest. I haven't had a need to author DITA topics with Author-it, so I have to rely on others for information on how it works. With Mike Stockman's and ...Read More »

Embedding video in your online help

{ Posted on Nov 06 2007 by annegentle }
2 Comments
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Categories : techpubs, tools
More note taking at sessions at the Quadralay WebWorks Publisher RoundUp. This session is with Stephanie Cottrell Bryant, author of Videoblogging for Dummies. She's an ePublisher user who embeds video demonstrations of software within online help. Customers love video embedded in ...Read More »

How to create help files for custom BMC Performance Managers

{ Posted on Mar 23 2006 by annegentle }
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Categories : talk.bmc
Cross-platform browser HTML-based help is built right in to the SDK for BMC Performance Manager All this is documented in the Controlled Availability release of the BMC Performance Manager Software Development Kit (SDK), but I thought I'd write ...Read More »