ITauthor

Here’s a good idea from Dave Winer (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6748103.stm): perpetual hosting.

Suppose you write a diary-style blog and you want to give your great-great-great grandchildren the chance to read about the life of their distance forebears. How are you going to do that? Right now, if you get run over by a bus tomorrow, when your hosting company mails you to tell you you need to renew your hosting deal or your domain name nobody’s going to pay up and your blog will disappear from the blogosphere. It’ll probably remain in some form within the Internet Archive, but no one will find it there and it won’t look or work like it was supposed to.

What you need is for someone (Google is the obvious candidate) to offer to capture your fully functional blog, or website of any kind, and keep it in its fully working state for ever, for a one-off payment.

Probably, for an additional regular payment, they’d snapshot your site on a regular basis. But, because you’ve made the initial lump sum payment, when you pop your clogs and stop paying for the snapshotting, the blog will just stay up there as you left it. I like to think of it as internet cryogenics.

For a company with vast storage capacity and the chutzpah to think they might be in operation for ever, it’s a sure-fire money making venture if ever there was one. So come on Google, what’re you waiting for?

Writer River – the collaborative list of links to tech-writer-related online content – has changed slightly.

You can still post links to it directly, but you can now also syndicate content to the site from your blog. This means that you can produce you own list of things you’ve read and found interesting, publish it on your blog with an accompanying RSS feed, and have those items also appear, alongside everyone else’s, on Writer River.

Why would you want to do this?

There are a few reasons why this might be something you’d like to do.

1. If you maintain a website, you might be interested in getting as many people to visit your site as possible. One way this can happen is through trackbacks (automatically generated links that appear on blog B when a post is published on blog A that includes a link to blog B). If you add items of interest directly into Writer River, the trackbacks will lead back to Writer River. If you list those interesting posts and articles on your own site, the trackbacks will lead people back to your site and boost your numbers.
2. You might just like to have your own list of the things that have interested you, all listed together on your own site. Now, because of the way Writer River is designed, you could already do this by going to the page on Writer River that lists just your posts (you can find this by clicking your name in the list of authors), and grabbing the RSS for this page (e.g. my old list is currently still there at: http://writerriver.com/author/alistair-christie/feed/) and then taking that and publishing it on your own site. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and that’s what it’s for: allowing content to be published in one place and syndicated out for publication in lots of other places. However, if you’re a blogger, it seems weird to post items somewhere else in order to get them to appear on your own site. Better to post to your own site and have that content crop up elsewhere (according to whoever wants to pick up your feeds and use them as they were intended to be used).
3. Doing things this way round means that when a Writer River reader, like myself, clicks an item link at Writer River they are transported to your blog, which gives them the context of who it was who found the thing interesting. The down-side to this is that there’s an extra step in there that people won’t be expecting. You’d expect, when you see something that looks interesting and click you click it, to be taken straight there to the original source, but instead you’re taken to the full version of the reference (e.g. a mini post on itauthor.com) and from there you can click through to the original article. This is a bit disorientating and confusing at first, but it does at least reveal something more about the poster, and it clicks up another hit on the poster’s website.

So how do you do this?

The very, very short and sweet version is:

• Produce an RSS feed containing your reading list
• Tell Tom Johnson (the creator/maintainer of Writer River) about the RSS feed. 
  Tom then adds it to the list of feeds that are aggregated into Writer River.

There are a number of ways you could create your RSS feed. The way I’m going to explain uses categories in a WordPress blog. You could equally well use WordPress tags. You could use another type of blog. You could even manually update a hand-crafted RSS file, if you felt so inclined.  

The basic steps for the WordPress method are as follows:

1. Within your WordPress blog, create a new blog category that you’ll give to all your reading list posts. You can call it anything you like (e.g. “What I’m Reading”) – all it’s used for is to collect together mini blog posts that are simply references to something interesting you’ve been reading. You need to be able to separate these out from your other blog posts so that you can display them separately as a reading list.
2. Alter your home page so that these reading list mini posts don’t appear there. They’re going to be listed separately so there’s no point putting them on the Home Page, and if you don’t exclude them you run the risk of alerting subscribers several times about the same reading list entry.  
         
   To exclude a category from your home page, first get the ID number of the category you want to exclude. You can find the category number by going to your Categories list in the WordPress admin pages, clicking the link for a category and looking in your browser’s address bar for the ID number. Make a note of this.
        
   Next, go to Appearance > Editor and open functions.php. Add the following function (changing 34 in this example to the number of the category you want to exclude):
        
   

   function exclude_category($query) {     
       if ( $query->is_home ) {      
           $query->set('cat', '-34');     
       }    
       return $query;     
   }     
   add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');

   (Source: http://blogmum.com/2009/04/how-to-exclude-categories-from-the-home-page-of-your-wordpress-blog/.)

3. Add a couple of posts about things you’ve read recently.
4. Go to the “What I’m Reading” category on your blog (assuming that’s what you called it) and check you’ve got an RSS feed that lists the items you posted. You do this in WordPress by adding /feed to the end of the URL for the category (for example, my feed is http://www.itauthor.com/category/what-i-am-reading/feed).
5. Now, with the web page version of the RSS feed displayed in your browser, right-click the page and choose to view the source code for the page. 
         
   This will show you the XML that produced this page. This is the RSS feed itself and, after a collection of details about the feed itself, it should contain a couple of item elements: one for each item on your list. Each item element should look something like this: 
          
   

   <item>
      <title>Fascinating Blog Post</title>
      <link>http://www.yourblog.com/path/to/this/particular/blog/entry/</link>
      <comments>http://www.yourblog.com/path/to/this/particular/blog/entry’s/#comments</comments>
      <pubDate>Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:31:13 +0000</pubDate>
      <dc:creator>Your Name</dc:creator>
      <category><![CDATA[What I'm Reading]]></category>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.yourblog.com/?p=3926</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Fascinating Blog Post. This is a fantastic read. You’d be mad not to 
   have a look [...]]]></description>
      <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://www.fascinatingblog.com/path/to/source/article">
   Fascinating Blog Post</a>. This is a fantastic read. You’d be mad not to have a look.</p>
   ]]></content:encoded>
      <wfw:commentRss>http://www.yourblog.com/path/to/this/particular/blog/entry’s/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
      <slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
   </item>

           
   The bits that get used on Writer River are the title, which is linked to the URL in the link element (i.e. the individual blog post on your blog) and the the contents of the description element (which are an abbreviated, plain text, version of your post). 
        
   The bit you’ll display on your blog are the contents of the content element, which contain the full text of your post, including any links, images, etc.
6. Copy your feed URL (e.g. http://www.itauthor.com/category/what-i-am-reading/feed) and email it to Tom Johnson asking him to add it to the Yahoo Pipes syndication aggregation he’s got set up for Writer River.

Tips

• Make sure the style of your reading list content doesn’t stray too far from the sort of thing that’s already on Writer River. 
• Don’t post too many items. Writer River works best as a “Best Of” site – so stick to posting just the most interesting things you’ve read. Please don’t just post everything you’ve read!

Other things you can do

• Create a feed on Feedburner.
        
  This isn’t necessary, but it adds a useful element of indirection. This might be useful down the line if your feed URL changes because if you promote the Feedburner version of the feed, rather than the original, then you just need to change the URL details at Feedburner and your syndications won’t break.
        
  It also provides a way of gathering statistics about how your feed is used.
• Create a category template for your “What I’m Reading” category.
     
  Again, why would you want to do this. Well if you don’t then your reading list, with it’s mini blog posts, will have to look like all your other categories. However (following Tom Johnson’s lead on this) I wanted to list my reading list without titles. The reason for this is that the title is linked to the individual page and I don’t want people going from the reading list to an individual reading list post: that would be really annoying for readers. What I wanted was that, if someone is interested in an item, they click the link and go to the web page I’m referring to. So, to do this, you need to be able to use a different template to display just this template.
         
  To create a category template, create a PHP file in your theme’s directory called category-n.php where n is the number of your “What I’m Reading” category. As noted above, you find the category number by going to your Categories page, clicking the link for a category and looking in your browser’s address bar for the ID number.
• Make a template that’s used to display single pages where the post belongs to a specific category.
           
  If you’ve got a category-specific template for your reading list you’ll probably want a category-specific single-post template, so that, when someone clicks a link on Writer River and arrives at your site, the post is displayed in a similar manner to the way it looks on the reading list. In my case this means it gets displayed without the title. And (another Tom Johnson tip) you can also put a note at the top of the page to explain that this is one item from a whole reading list of other links, and include a prominent link to that list (i.e. to your “What I’m Reading” category).
          
  To create a single-post template for a specific category, first add the following to your functions.php file, anywhere between the opening and closing PHP tags:
        
  

  add_filter('single_template', create_function('$t', 'foreach( (array) get_the_category() as $cat ) {     
          if ( file_exists(TEMPLATEPATH . "/single-{$cat->term_id}.php") )    
          return TEMPLATEPATH . "/single-{$cat->term_id}.php";     
  }    
  return $t;' ));

  (Source: http://www.nathanrice.net/blog/wordpress-single-post-templates/.)

  Now you can create a post template by creating a PHP file in your theme’s directory called single-n.php where n is the number of your “What I’m Reading” category. For example, the /itauthor.com/wp-content/themes/blueprint directory on my server now contains the templates: category-34.php and single-34.php.
        
  Once you’ve created these template files, you can edit them from the Edit Themes page of your WordPress admin pages. 
  
• Modify the Press This bookmarklet for your blog
        
  The Press This bookmarklet is a browser bookmark with added functionality provided by some nifty JavaScript. It makes it very easy to create a post relating to a web page you’re currently looking at – so it’s perfect for adding items to your reading list. 
         
  
         
  You get a Press This bookmark by going to the Tools page for your WordPress blog and dragging the Press This link into your bookmarks list.
        
  Note: The bookmarklet uses the inbuilt post editor for WordPress, so if you’ve installed a plugin that swaps the normal post editing buttons for something funkier (e.g. I was using Dean's FCKEditor For Wordpress) you’ll have to disable this plugin or you’ll just get a blank text box in the little Press This window. I also had to disable the Disable wpautop plugin, which disables WordPress’s irritating automatic paragraph formatting, because with this enabled any line breaks in the Press This editor disappeared when I published the post.
        
  For me, posting to my reading list is the only thing I use my Press This bookmarklet for, so I want my “What I’m Reading” category to be selected by default.
         
   
        
  
  To add a default category (i.e. already checked) at the top of the Categories list in the Press This window, you need to edit the wp-admin/press-this.php file. Unfortunately you’re going to have to redo this change every time you upgrade WordPress. The stuff you need to add is in red. Change the category number and name as appropriate for your blog.
        
  

  <div id="categorydiv" class="stuffbox">     
    <h2><?php _e('Categories') ?></h2>   
    <div class="inside">     
       
      <div id="categories-all" class="ui-tabs-panel">    
        <ul id="categorychecklist" class="list:category categorychecklist form-no-clear">   
          <!-- Edit this line to suit your setup - my default category number is "34" and its name is "What I'm   
  Reading" –>   
          <li id='category-34'><label class="selectit"><input value="34" type="checkbox" checked    
  name="post_category[]" id="in-category-34"/>What I'm Reading</label></li>     
          <?php wp_category_checklist($post->ID, false, false, $popular_ids) ?>      
        </ul>      
      </div>     

  Kudos to johnke at the WordPress.org forums for suggesting this (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/216525).
• Create a twitterfeed for your reading list.
         
  Twitterfeed is an online resource that allows you to push the contents of an RSS feed (like a feed from a blog) into your twitter account, so that your blog posts (or the first few words plus an abbreviated URL) get sent out to your twitter followers. If you also syndicate your tweets to Facebook it means that your new reading list items will also show up as Facebook status messages.
         
  You can set Twitterfeed to check the RSS feed for your reading list once an hour. You can use the Advanced settings to add a prefix to these posts (I use “I've been reading: “), and I’d recommend setting it to include the “title only” rather than “title & description” because once you’ve added the prefix and the link to your post there isn’t much room for any more than two or three words from your post content.
         
   

Respect

I’ve already mentioned him a few times and, at the risk of embarrassing him, I must doff my cap once again to Tom Johnson who created Writer River and came up with most of the ideas I’ve fleshed out in this post.

Want to find out more? Go read these posts on Tom’s blog:

• "What I'm Reading": A New Feature on My Site and a Tweak of Writer River
• I Need Your Human Aggregated Content

You’ve been asked to update a manual containing diagrams that were created in Adobe Illustrator. You need to update some of the diagrams but you don’t have a copy of Illustrator and there’s no budget to buy you a copy. What do you do?

Answer: download and install the free, open source alternative to Illustrator:
 
http://www.inkscape.org/download/

Inkscape allows you to import Illustrator-format .ai files. You can then edit the diagram in Inkscape and output a new .png or .emf for the manual.

The only problems I found doing this were:

1. Text entered in Illustrator will typically have some automatic kerning added to make it look just right. Inkscape can’t handle kerning and you won’t be able to edit the text until you remove it. So you need to select the text you want to edit and choose Text > Remove Manual Kerns.
2. Inkscape add lots of object groups. Things are grouped within other things within other groups within other groups … So, to move individual objects around you need to click on the thing you want to move (which will usually select everything in the diagram) and keep pressing Ctrl + Shift + G until enough of the groups are ungrouped and you can see a dotted selection box around the object you want to move.

I really like Inkscape. It does most of the things you can do in Illustrator – in a slightly clunky way perhaps, but it’s a powerful tool and will allow you to produce professional-looking diagrams.

If you just want to create diagrams from scratch and you don’t need to edit existing Illustrator diagrams, you might prefer to try out a true Web 2.0 solution instead: Raven – one of the suite of image tools from Aviary.

Raven is a free online vector design tool that works completely within the browser. It’s got a very good-looking interface and I found its Bezier curve editing much easier to use than the same thing in Inkscape. But, because some of the functionality is happening on the server side, you have to put up with a little delay uploading and downloading files to and from the server if you’re going to be creating and maintaining them in Raven. For a browser app, though, it’s a pretty amazing piece of coding and design work.

I only create simple diagrams, but if you’re a bit of an artist you should have a look at this video to see what you can do in Raven:

And if you’re looking for a free alternative to Photoshop or SnagIt, check out what else Aviary does in the browser:

I love listening to spoken-word audio on my iPod,, but, on the whole, I don’t like listening to audio from a Web page. Partly this is because the sound card on my Dell Vostro 1700 is extremely poor and picks up interference from the hard disk drive. But mainly it’s because I like to listen to audio when I’m walking the dog and when I’m commuting to work in my car.

Most of the time this means listening to podcasts and usually these days, where audio is available on a Web page it’s in MP3 format and it’s also available as a podcast. But in some places audio is still only available as RealAudio, which has to be played on your computer using RealPlayer.

So, if you’re like me, you need a way of getting audio that’s only available in RealAudio format off a Web page, into MP3 format, and into your iPod or other MP3 player.

My particular case was that I wanted to listen to the well-known audio documentary “Ghetto Life 101”. This is available from Sound Portraits (http://soundportraits.org/on-air/ghetto_life_101/) as a RAM file. Alternatively you can find a collection of David Isay documentaries, all as RAM files, here: http://www.talkinghistory.org/isay.html.

So here’s one way of doing this (this relies on using Firefox as your browser):

1. Download and install Firefox if you don’t already use this as your browser.
2. Once you’ve installed Firefox, download and install the DownloadThemAll Firefox add-on.
3. Browse to the Web page containing the RAM file you want to play on your MP3 player. For example, try going to http://www.talkinghistory.org/isay.html.
4. Choose Tools > DownloadThemAll! Tools > DownloadThemAll!
   
   The DownloadThemAll! dialog box opens, listing all the downloadable files on the Web page.
5. Unselect any selected Filter checkbox and enter *ram in the Fast filtering field. This will select just files with the .ram file name extension.
   
   In this screenshot I’ve used the filter *isdn*ram, because the page I’m processing has three versions of each RAM file and I only want the ISDN-quality files (which all have “isdn” in the file name)
   
   
6. In the Save files in field, enter the location where you want to save the file(s).
7. Click Start!
8. Download and install FormatFactory.
9. Start FormatFactory and click All to MP3.
   
   
10. Click Add File.
11. Select all the RAM files you downloaded.
12. Click OK.
    
     
13. Copy the resulting MP3 files to your MP3 player, or drag them into your music folder in iTunes and sync your iPod.

If you’re downloading a lot of files, you might like to give them all the same artist or album tag. To do this really easily, download and install ID3-TagIT (note: this link is to an .exe file – always run your virus scanner on any executable file you download before running it).

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Matthew Ellison runs his own UK-based training and consulting company, specializing in user assistance design and technology. He coordinates the annual UA Europe Conference and is himself a popular speaker at conferences and training events around the world. He also regularly publishes articles and reviews on user assistance.

In this edition of the ITauthor Podcast I talk to Matthew about the UA Europe Conference.

 
We discuss:

• the number of countries from which delegates attend the conference
• what it’s like being the organiser of a large conference for technical communicators
• how can delegates justify the budget to attend the UA conference in these difficult economic times
• the sessions and speakers we can look forward to at this year's conference
• the No.1 issue affecting technical writers today
• trends or changes technical writers ought to be aware of
• what keeps Matthew busy when he’s not organising and running the UA Europe Conference

Talking about the “good enough” philosophy for user assistance, Matthew says:

"There's a fine line between doing documentation that's good enough and not being professional, and I certainly would never want to put something in front of a user that I didn't consider a professional piece of work."

Find out all about the UA Europe Conference at: http://www.uaconference.eu.

 The music I play at the beginning and end of the show is by Amplifico. You can hear more of their music at Podshow.