There’s usability, accessibility, and readability that we’re all well aware of. I’d like to toss in one more to the mix: adaptability. By this I mean the ability to change docs on the fly to accommodate real-time actions in social media or due to user-generated content that needs to be addressed rather quickly.
How adaptable are [...]
Your Docs: Thought About Adaptability?
July 7, 2010 By 1 Comment
The Magic of Touchscreens and HTML5
May 26, 2010 By 1 Comment
This grabbed me yesterday. The info I want to discuss is longer than a tweet, shorter than a regular blog post, but I just have to get this out until I can start testing it. So – here’s an interim thought. Just can’t drop everything to think about this at the moment. If nothing else, be [...]
(1-Yr Archive) New Writing Methodologies
May 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Tech writing is changing, has changed, and the old ways won’t work any longer. Many of my posts over the past year address those considerations. Here they are.
Writing Styles
Smaller screens. Smaller devices. Smaller word counts, don’t you think?
Think Mobile When You Write
Cut, Cut, Cut Your Content and Procedures
Video and Touchscreens
Well, keyboards and Flash are perhaps [...]
Think Outside the Computer: Touchscreens, HTML5, & Flash
May 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Touchscreens are here to stay. Computers as we know them are gone already. Really. It’s time to fast-track the planning for delivering docs and content to these types of devices.
Forget a laptop or netbook. I have a computer I can fit in a pocket. That would be my iPhone. I look at it as a [...]
Minimal Procedure Content: Reasoning
November 13, 2009 By 2 Comments
The procedure I wrote about creating a Twitter list uses abbreviated content. This post describes the reasoning behind and decisions made in writing the topic.
Title
Instead of using this:
Create a Twitter List
I opt for this construction:
Twitter List: Create
Reasons
It puts the topic first. You don’t have to dig through the content to get to [...]
WordPress Rules! Goin' to WordCamp …
August 28, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Oh boy. I feel like a kid at Christmas. I’ve signed up to go to WordCamp Seattle, taking place next month. That’s because, of course, WordPress is the coolest thing ever. I think that every tech writer needs to know it. How I ever lived without it before now I can’t say. I could easily [...]
Legal Requirements in the New Age
July 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment
With the recent news this past week about a woman being sued $50K for a tweet she wrote and the resultant backlash on the company that was suing, it started me thinking about legal ramifications of using social media for business. I’m all for using social media as part of an overall tech doc strategy, [...]
The Changing Roles of Writers and Editors
July 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment
As my friends and family know, I’ve been mesmerized of late by a box of old letters I had stashed in my closet. The letters were from long ago – the late 70s and early 80s – before computers were in use, and definitely before e-mail.
The letters are a joy to read, as they recall [...]
Might We Become Walking Computers?
July 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment
What do an article in Wired magazine about attaching a sensor to your running shoe and uploading it via iPod for data analysis, a camping trip, an article about wearing video screens, a scientist husband, a discussion about wildlife parks, office work, and work by a W3C working group have in common? If you can [...]
Wikipedia to Add Editable Video Functionality
June 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Game over. Print is on its way out. I just read an article about Wikipedia adding video functionality down the road that will enable people to edit videos.
I’ve been figuring that video is key, and that people would take some video already made, come up with their own version, and post it somewhere. I’ve seen [...]