Month: May 2008

bookmark_borderWeekender

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Ironman kicked off Friday night, and I have to say it’s a darn good blockbuster with Robert Downey Jnr. on twinklingly good form as the rock’n’roll engineer and hero of the story. Jeff Bridges was pretty good too although we are convinced he had platform boots on or something because he suddenly seemed very tall. Gwyneth Paltrow is in it too but as the token tight-skirt wearing personal assistant she had little do (but what she did do, she did well).

Saturday was an odd day. I felt a little light-headed for most of it, still not sure why although I’m wondering if it was upping my blood pressure pills (ACE inhibitors, now on 7.5mg a day… will be 10mg next week). Spent most of day pottering really, finally finishing the kitchen floor and a few other little jobs.

And yesterday was BBQ and footie day. Prepared the food in the morning, watched Manchester United win the title, Fulham stay up (somehow!) and ultimately won 2 of the 2 fantasy football leagues I’m in! Then off out to cook enough food to feed about 20 people, despite the fact it was just us, my parents and my sister. Still it did mean we got to have some rather delicious Hungarian wine. Yum yum yum.

Aside from that, not much else going on. Well there is a LOT going on but it’s all work focussed at the moment, and that is a very good thing.

bookmark_borderRecently Read

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I took a few days holiday last week (if you get the chance, go visit Budapest, it’s lovely) so here’s a little bit of catchup from the RSS feeds I monitor. You can download the list over on the right there.

How Corporate RSS Supports Collaboration and Innovation
Dennis McDonald pulls together some good arguments around introducing Web 2.0 ideas to your company, noting that a lot of business cases rely on raw numbers and that, in the case of social networking tools, there is:

… a disadvantage of taking a “beancounter” approach to implementing social media within an organization. While you might be able to quantify the time, effort, and technology associated with impacted processes, you can’t necessarily predict when and where the benefits (such as innovations or new ides) will occur.

Bye Bye GoLive!
Adobe finally realise what most web developers already knew, GoLive can’t compete with DreamWeaver (also now owned by Adobe). However, it’s not all bad news if you are a GoLive user:

the company will continue to support GoLive users with online tutorials and migration assistance created by usage experts. The company has also collaborated with online training service Lynda.com to provide tutorials for GoLive users.

And one more thing
The Hoefler & Frere-Jones blog continues to provide some fascinating information for typographists (?) and writers alike. This time they take a look at the many forms of the ampersand.

As for the word “ampersand,” folk etymologies abound. The likeliest account, offered by the OED, is explained by early alphabet primers in which the symbol was listed after X, Y, Z as “&: per se, and.” Meaning “&: in itself, ‘and’”, and inevitably pronounced as “and per se and”, it’s a quick corruption to “ampersand,” and the rest is history.

The Dawning of the Age of Content – and why Content Convergence Matters to You
For anyone watching the way information is now created, collated and distributed on the world wide web, this article will ring true. We ARE all watching what is going on, aren’t we?

We’re all content producers. And we’re all about to live through interesting times with the dawning of The Age of Content. Industry is discovering content as a commodity, as inventory with value, and the rules are changing fast.

The new rules are not just for high-profit content like movies and music. What was once seen as the lowliest form of commercial content within an enterprise – technical manuals, support documentation, and other business content – is starting to take its place alongside other valued corporate assets.

The 10, 20, 30 Powerpoint rule
An oldie but a goodie, it’s often quoted but it’s worth re-reading (especially as I’ve just pulled together a presentation that has.. eh… 23 slides.. ). It’s not always applicable of course but well worth keeping in mind.

It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Summer of Doc, anyone?
Janet has a good idea for getting student technical writers (and hey why limit it?) a little bit of experience.

Now in its fourth year, Google Summer of Code supports students in writing code for participating open-source projects, which provide mentors to help guide the students’ work. Thanks to Google’s sponsorship, the students receive a stipend (making this a summer job), and mentors receive a nominal compensation for their time.
…
If you substitute code/documentation, developers/tech writers, Computer Science/Technical Communication, I think it’s fairly obvious that the same benefits could apply to Tech Comm students writing documentation for open source projects.

And finally a nice quote from the late great Douglas Adams:

” I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. “

bookmark_borderThanks for complaining

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Ever get the feeling that no-one reads your documentation? It’s a frequent issue amongst Technical Writers and the general stance reflects the approach many take to make sure that, when someone finally picks up the documentation, they can get to the information they need as quickly as possible.

Given that, there is little worse than to have errors reported in your documentation. After all, if they’ve only just started using it to help them solve a problem and one of the first things they spot is an error then it’s understandable that confidence drops and that they are less likely to go to the documentation in the future.

Of course we all do the very best job we can, yet the fact remains that mistakes happen, errors occur. The reason that this tends to be a bigger issue for information is down to how we process the knowledge we have.

Without getting into too much detail, learning is a continuous process and most of that happens when you are doing things, using the tools at your disposal and figuring out how they work and how they help you achieve what you are trying to complete. By the time you decide to check the documentation, you’ve (usually) got a good bank of knowledge already, and it’s building all the time.

So, when the documentation is wrong (regardless of whether the reader spots the mistake immediately or only realises it after trying out the instructions) it seems to be an obvious mistake. After all, if I can figure out how to do X, why is the documentation wrong for Y, it’s just the same process?

Software applications that have minor errors in them are tolerated because they are the tool and sometimes there isn’t an alternative. You learn how to accomodate those errors in the application and work around them. You can’t do that with documentation, it’s either right or wrong (ambiguous documentation is presumed wrong) so confidence in the rest of the information is linked to those initial few instances of usage.

We all have review procedures that should capture errors in the documentation, we do our best to think about how the user will be interacting with the product and base the structure and content of our documentation on that information, and we all receive that email that says “On page XY of the User Guide, it states that…” and our hearts drop a little.

However I think we should embrace those moments, be positive about them! You have a user who cares enough about the documentation to complain and I think it’s worthwhile thanking them for pointing out the error, tell them that it will get fixed, and encourage them to continue to let you know if they spot anything else.

So next time you get one of those emails, or a bug in the documentation is raised, be sure to follow up with the user and thank them. They are proving that people do RTFM.

bookmark_borderAn open letter to Journalists

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Dear Journalist,

I understand that at times it can be hard to find a good article, that deadlines must be met, and that you are under a lot pressure to deliver.

I also understand that the internet is chockful of content, a lot of it of good quality, and that blogs in particularly lend themselves nicely to the provision of the “human side” of the story. I understand that, really I do.

Unfortunately there seems to be a bit of an issue at the moment, with a few journalists pillaging blogs for content and the underlying view seems to be, “well, they are just blogs”. Now, I know (and I’m guilty of this in the past myself) that bloggers have always been the most forthcoming with credit when re-using your content but I think we are getting better at that and remember, just about all of us are amateurs.

That said, there really is no excuse for this sort of thing* which really doesn’t cast your profession in the best light and, even to the hobbyist blogger, spanks of shoddy work.

Like I say, I know that it’s only a few of you that are falling into this bad habit, and I guess that if you weren’t misquoting and badly researching your articles around blog stories, you’d be doing it on some other topic, but here’s the kicker.

We bloggers read each others blogs. We know them well, like old friends. We know the history, we know the personality behind the blog, so we know when all you’ve done is do a few quick searches and cobbled together a twisted view of reality.

And, really, we’d all kinda like you to stop doing that. Feel free to contact us, ask us questions, learn about who we are and why we blog, and most times we’ll be so accomodating you won’t believe it. Honest, most of us are pretty decent people just like most of you.

I hope that’s cleared things up a little,

Sincerely,

The Hobbyist Blogger

* In this case, the editor has been contacted and the article has been reported to the Press Complaints Commission. I’d encourage you all to spread the word about this, it’s not the first time and unfortunately I doubt it’ll be the last, so the more coverage this gets (hopefully) the lower the chance of it happening to you or I.

bookmark_borderBack to reality

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As Budapest fades into rose-tinted memory the mundane returns.

Well it’s not mundane really, it’s quite exciting you know, getting up at 1am to save a little mouse from the clutches of our cat and then again at 4.30am to remove a dead mouse from the kitchen floor (different mouse, he’s getting good at this!).

Elsewhere, there are still a few small jobs to do in the kitchen to finish it off, including a rather bizarre problem with the new light I fitted. We are using LED bulbs (like a halogen bulb but with 8 LEDs crammed into the same space), and when you turn them off they … well they aren’t on full but they are still on. It’s only really noticeable at night. I’m wondering if there is a short somewhere but… wouldn’t that have blown the light? Back to O Grade Physics for me, for despite getting an “A” I can’t remember a damn thing…

And, of course, as we currently have the bright shiny thing in the sky the next two weeks are officially Summer. So, out to the garden we go to do some weeding and general tidying up, ignoring the fact that my office still needs some order restored as it is holding the remnants of the kitchen upheaval.

Ohh and on that, still no response to our complaint letter. If there isn’t a letter waiting at home this evening then tomorrow morning they’ll be getting a stern phone call.

So, aside from mucking about with Joomla with half a mind on resurrecting Scottish Blogs, popping pills and generally trying to be healthy so my next check up at the doctor will reveal a lowered blood pressure, and considering buying Wii Fit, it’s pretty much life as usual.

Which is, you know, quite a good thing.

bookmark_borderRevision Control

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Prompted by an excellent article – Subversion for writers – I thought it might be useful to offer a Windows view. Like most software groups, our development team use a version control system to manage multiple versions of the product; we have customers using many previous versions and all are maintained in the same system so we can patch fixes back through multiple versions.

Our team of writers use the same system, although as we are using FrameMaker we lose some of the nicer features but the core reasons for using a version control system remain – files are locked by whoever is working on them, and we have a full version history of changes made, including when, who and why.
Continue reading “Revision Control”