March 2009

Recent posts

My 5 most recent posts (currently showing on the Home page) are:


The 20 next most recent posts are:

  • Scott Hanselman and Chris Sells on managing people and your time - 1 February 2010
    As a manager who never set out to be a manager (but who, nevertheless, is trying to be a good manager) Scott Hanselman's recent follow-up interview with Chris Sells about management struck a chord with me and I wanted to ...
  • Maintaining a Flare project in Google Code - 30 January 2010
    I've got a MadCap Flare project that I want to publish as open source code for anyone to go and download. It turns out this is extremely easy to do using Google Code. And Google Code has ...
  • South Korea Beckons: Global Awareness and Cultural Sensitivity Strategies for Western Technical Communicators - 28 January 2010
    I enjoy working for a company where everyone is on first name terms and you can talk to anyone at any level without having to make an appointment. I would find it very difficult to work in Korea.Rahul Prabhakar writes: Koreans ...
  • On the hoof Madcap Flare screencast - 26 January 2010
    In my last podcast I talked about a couple of unscripted screencasts I'd recorded for colleagues at work, to show them how to use some Flare extensions I'd created. My question in the podcast was: is something like this (knocked ...
  • ITauthor podcast #32 – Unscripted screencasts and Flare extensibility - 23 January 2010
    ITauthor podcast #32 – Unscripted screencasts and Flare extensibility For this edition of the ITauthor podcast, I just turned the microphone on and started talking. So if ums and ahs annoy you, this podcast probably isn't for you! I ruminate over whether ...
  • Documentation: the user assistance of last resort? - 23 January 2010
    Rhonda Bracey of CyberText Consulting recently wrote a blog post entitled “Documentation: Backup for UI deficiencies?” In the post she quotes an article by Sue Woolley: Very few people these days will sit down and read ...
  • Documentation metrics: How do you prove you’re worth it? - 15 January 2010
    You know how sometimes you read something and it niggles away at you and you can’t quite get it out of your system? This happened to me with a blog post by Ivan Walsh from November last year. In his ...
  • Adding function buttons to the Madcap Flare WebHelp toolbar - 12 January 2010
    Madcap have, very sensibly, made it easy for you to add your own buttons to the toolbar of Flare’s WebHelp. You can use these custom buttons to … well, to do pretty much whatever you need them to do, within ...
  • Getting Things Done: How I Set Priorities - 11 January 2010
    I'm always struggling with the challenge of getting things done, so I read this post on the "Technical Writing Tips" blog with interest. ...
  • Making 16:9 videos display correctly in Windows Media Player - 31 December 2009
    My video camera records in 16:9, which has taken over from 4:3 as the standard aspect ratio. The trouble is, when I play those video in Windows Media Player, or try and edit them in something like Windows Movie Maker, ...
  • @font-face and 15 Free Fonts You Can Use Today - 21 December 2009
    A nicely written explanation of the @font-face CSS method of allow visitors to a web page to use fonts that they don't have installed. The article also has links to a selection of free fonts. ...
  • Putting the flare back into a sluggish Flare - 18 December 2009
    A little tip for users of Madcap Flare who find that things are getting very … very … very … s – l – o – w … Your problem may be that the Flare database for your project ...
  • Overcoming hard-coded styles in Madcap Flare - 5 December 2009
    After several months away from Madcap Flare, coming back to work on it again, I’m reminded that one of the reasons I like this technical authoring tool is that it uses standard XHTML. So, if you’re using Flare to produce ...
  • Access is good - 30 November 2009
    Gordon McLean writes about his company's new community website where their documentation is now all available in HTML format. Sadly this is not publicly visible. ...
  • Deobfuscating the title page - 27 November 2009
    For a long time – not without reason – I avoided putting specific version information on the title page of documents. Instead, we put obfuscated details in small print at the bottom of the copyright page that told us (the ...
  • The application may experience a hard landing - 8 October 2009
    We all know what a crash is, right? Well, I’m not sure. Those of us who work with software are used to saying that an application crashed when what we mean is it stopped working in a sudden and/or ugly ...
  • Horrors of usability #1 - 14 September 2009
    I was using a horrible application called QMAP today. It’s a program for drawing “process maps” – that is, flow charts representing a process. In my case I was editing some diagrams of our documentation processes. But please, next time, ...
  • Acronym Finder (CyberText Newsletter) - 25 August 2009
    The CyberText Newsletter mentions a useful online acronym dictionary. Very handy, although when I looked up HTML just now I was amused that HyperText Markup Language was only second on the list of definitions, with Hotmail first and third place ...
  • Be a friend of ITauthor - 23 August 2009
    I’ve added a Google Friend Connect widget to the sidebar of this site. The idea is that if you read this blog you might like to add yourself as a “member” and then other people can see who visits this ...
  • twitter - 23 August 2009
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