bookmark_borderISTC West of Scotland area group – January meeting

Theme: The remit of communication professionals in the organisation. How can different comms professionals (technical authors, editors, web content/marketing/training writers, internal/corporate comms, information architects, graphic designers…) work effectively with each other and the rest of the organisation?

Time: Monday 25 January 2010, from 7.30 pm onwards.

Venue: Waxy O’Connors pub, 44 West George Street, Glasgow, G2 1DH. Please make your way to McTurk’s Room on the middle level.

The event is free and you don’t need to be an ISTC member to attend. Get in touch with Katja McLaughlin for more details.

bookmark_borderBayerische Motoren Werke

I’d love to say it isn’t.

It’s really really not a personal thing, and I do know a few of them so I KNOW they aren’t ALL bad. It’s just that 8 times out of 10, when I finally see the badge, it’s one of them.

I’m willing to concede that it might be one of those things, you know, when you are more attuned to something inevitably you see more of it than you had before.

Yet there does seem to a mindset and, let’s be honest, it’s not just me saying this, the type of people who buy them seem to be of similar personality.

Brash, aggressive, impatient and inconsiderate. I could go on, but their driving style speaks volumes. Every single time I have some twat driving 2 feet from my bumper, when they finally swoosh past (just as we approach a corner, or small hill usually) it’s the blue and white badge that glares back.

This driving style is all the more baffling given the current weather conditions, and it’s just scary having a big 5 Series bearing down on your bumper with ice and snow bordering the roads.

Not only that, but of all the cars I’ve seen that haven’t been de-iced, or de-snowed, in the past couple of weeks, it does seem to be either BMWs or Jags.

Now I’m pretty careful when I de-ice my car, mainly because I like to have clear windows. Visibility whilst driving is a big thing for me, yet apparently somepeople, quite literally, jump in their car, run it for 5 mins and drive off.

You can recognise this particular brand of idiot because bar a small section of the windscreen, all of their windows are frosted up or still covered with snow.

It baffles me how anyone can think this is ok, and that’s from a common sense point of view, let alone it being a legal requirement.

So, taking all this into account, imagine my glee at spotting a nice big BMW sitting on the hard shoulder last night, it’s rear window completely frozen, and the policeman standing pointing at it whilst the driver looked on, the twat.

It’s moments like this that convince me there is such a thing as karma.

bookmark_borderWords and books

I’m blaming Stephen Fry.

I tried, I really did try and read his autobiography but it just didn’t flow for me. As wonderful a wordsmith as he is, it just didn’t read well, the flow and cadence was wrong and I found myself slowing down to read things in his voice. Whilst I like Stephen Fry, taking him to bed every night got a bit taxing.

So I gave up. I stopped. I admitted defeat and stopped reading which isn’t something I’ve done before.

Actually that’s a lie, I’ve given up a several books after faltering in the first few pages but that’s different. That’s like taking the first bite of a meal before realising it’s not what you wanted, or isn’t sitting kindly on the palate, and so you call over the chef (cook, wife, whatever), send the meal back and ask for something else.

No, this was different and it took me a while to realise that, although I’d read over half of the damn thing, I just wasn’t enjoying it.

That got me thinking about things I do enjoy, things I don’t enjoy, and which things I would have to change in my life to get more of the former and less of the latter.

And before my mother pitches up, yes I know life includes things you don’t enjoy but need to do but gosh darnit I’m all grown up now and if I can’t sway things more in the favour of enjoyableness then… well… that’s just not fair! Or some other slightly more reasoned argument that I can’t quite think of at this time of the morning.

With that in mind, one of my New Year resolutions (and I’m very aware of such things, setting yourself up for failure and all that) is to read more. Like my resolutions of last year, I’ve written it (and two others) on a piece of paper and wedged it in the frame of the mirror I use everyday, so I have a constant reminder of such things.

I am now reading, and enjoying, Empress Orchid. A tale of the last Empress of China, a story with characters, intrigue, passion and no small amount of gorgeous imagery. It’s nice to find myself enjoying the act of reading again, and perhaps I’ve dwelt too long on “professional” books in the past couple of years. I need to make more time for the novel.

Which means my rather quiet Goodreads account should start seeing a few more regular updates. It also tells me I have 34 books in my ‘to-read’ pile but don’t let that stop you recommending me more.

bookmark_borderMaking the brave choices

I was recently asked to write an article about blogging for inclusion in a piece focussed on social media and how it will both challenge and change our profession as a whole and the more I wrote the more it helped me sort out my own thoughts on the matter.

One thing I’ve realised is that even if you don’t think social media will impact your own professional circumstances, I have no doubts that it will change the way our profession is perceived.

I’ve also come to realise that I’ve done a fair bit of talking about a lot of this stuff, yet continue to be stalled on actually doing it. So, with a new year stretching ahead of me I guess it’s time to put up or shut up.

As I have control of our developer community website the most obvious place to start is with a blog. Using the blog to publish short articles, and allowing people to comment on them seems to be a straightforward approach and with some encouragement I know some of the developers will contribute short articles as well.

The challenge will come in how we seed the community. At present it’s telling that with a little bit of PR, the number of people visiting the community website rises, so for now I’ll continue with the old school methods to drive traffic to the website (mainly through ‘update’ emails). Hopefully, if we provide enough interaction opportunities on the website, that need will drop away and the community well start to sustain itself.

Social media is a strange beast at times. There is always a lot of noise at first and, when it dies away it can seem like there isn’t much substance left. However, the people who are succeeding at using social media services, the people at the cutting edge of such things, the people who adopt new ideas and technology and are ready and willing to try them out to see if they work, are finding that there is a much richer set of capabilities than may be obvious, and the real value in your use of social media isn’t the technology but the people who use it, the community.

Your circumstances may mean that, for reasons outwith your control, social media just cannot be considered. However for everyone else, surely it’s time you took a step back and thought about the information you produce, the community of people who use it, and how best to meet their needs.

Maybe it’s time to make some brave choices.

And if you’ve come this far it’s about now that the reality of social media hits home.

You see for all the strengths and possibilities that the myriad of social media services offer, the one thing that no-one else can tell you is what choice to make. The direction you take depends on too many variables that only you know but, at this point, there is only one thing worse than making the wrong decision.

Not making a decision at all.

The information platform is changing, it is evolving and will continually evolve over the coming few years. You can’t afford to wait until the evolution is finished, you need to jump aboard now. You’ll need to learn fast, figure things out as you go, plan as best you can, and concede defeat at times but if you don’t then you’ll be left where you are now.

Except it’ll be 3 years further down the line and the rest of the world will have moved on.

bookmark_borderThis is not Friends

If it was, this would be the “one where nothing that interesting happens because, you know, life is mostly like that”.

Or perhaps it would be the “one where all anyone seems to be talking about is the snow and ice”.

Or, most realistically, it would be the “one where he spends all day doing nothing much despite the fact he has two websites to design yet can find no inspiration whatsoever, so instead he’s been reading Empress Orchid which he is quite enjoying”.

Which basically means that one of my quieter, unspoken, New Year resolutions has kicked in (read books), where as the ones I spoke out loud have faltered already (exercise and lose weight). Not that I take these things seriously, they are more a passing curiosity to be honest.

And it’s not like I don’t have other things on my mind.

Like the fact our boiler packed up on Friday. Well, it didn’t pack up, per se, more just stopped working and, it seems, I won’t be the only person suffering as it’s a ‘known trait’ of the modern condensing boiler for the very mechanism it uses to fail in cold weather.

I’d be less miffed about this if we’d been allowed to choose the type of boiler we got fitted a couple of years ago but we didn’t, the government chose it for us. So we have a condensing boiler, which includes a condenser trap which, in very cold weather, freezes. It’s a common complaint, apparently. Which helps us not a jot.

Although it’s fair to say the government did help me find out that we have cavity wall insulation in the house, something I didn’t know already but which the nice man who came round to talk about the government grant figured out after drilling a hole in the wall.

Ohh and I’ve had a haircut.

Yup, life doesn’t get much more interesting than this people!

bookmark_borderAnalyse this

Let me tell you a story. In it our hero (me) fights valiantly against two Javascript dragons called Webhelp and Google Analytics. It’s a bloody battle and at the end, when all the fighting is done, well … you’ll have to read on and find out.

Some background first.

We have a developer community website which hosts downloads of our software and all the documentation in PDF format. To make it easier for people to find information in the product documentation, we also host a Webhelp version of each and every document in one master Webhelp system so you can search across the entire thing. It works really well.

To track how the other areas of the website are used, we have a Google Analytics account and the necessary code has been added. For the Webhelp, the code is in both the index.htm and topic.htm files.

But, and this is where the story begins, it doesn’t work properly.

Google Analytics will happily track every visit to the WebHelp system, but it stops there. Any click made within the system is recorded as a click but there is no detail on WHAT topic was viewed. We had hoped to get stats on this to allow us to better focus on the areas of the product people were enquiring about but we are, essentially, blind.

It’s very annoying.

Why is this so? Well I think it’s to do with the way WebHelp is created. It uses a Javascript library called Ext JS which, amongst other things, means that every time you open a topic in the Webhelp, it’s loaded through a Javascript call so Google Analytics never ‘sees’ a new HTML page (a new topic) being loaded so doesn’t know what you are viewing.

I think. I’m not 100% sure to be honest.

I’ve logged a somewhat vague Support call with Author-it, and have enlisted the help of our own webmaster. Next step will be to beg and plead with some of the developers for some of their brain power (most of them have a fair bit to spare).

It’s hugely annoying, being so close to what we want but not able to fix it myself, but sometimes you just have to admit defeat.

Of the battle, that is. I WILL win the war!