March 2009
Recent posts
My 5 most recent posts (currently showing on the Home page) are:
- Video plays locally but not on the web
- Help is just a search and a click away
- Deleting those pesky lines in Microsoft Word
- Perl basics for beginners (on Windows)
- Gotchas with running a Perl script as a cron job
The 20 next most recent posts are:
- Madcap giveth and they taketh away - 2 August 2010
The context menu for a span in Flare 5 Madcap Flare 6.1 has been out for a while now and, if you haven't already, you really should upgrade to it if you're a ... - PHP: swapping round columns & rows in field/record data - 20 July 2010
I'm blogging this just because I couldn't find a solution via Google so I had to figure this out myself and it might save you some time if you're trying to do the same thing. I have some PHP ... - Madcap fixes PushOK issue in Flare 6.1 - 20 July 2010
The title of this post pretty much says it all. We were using the PushOK plugin to allow us to check files in and out of our Subversion (SVN) version control system from within Madcap Flare. When we upgraded to ... - Richard Hamilton: "Great idea, but …" - 5 July 2010
Richard Hamilton writes about the most common reason why good ideas fail. We underestimate the pain of our current situation and overestimate the pain of adopting a new idea. In discussing what a manager can do, faced with this ... - Embrace your inner sloth - 1 July 2010
Flare Single-Sourcing: My Ten Best Practices | June 2010 MadNewz 10 useful tips from Chris Sullivan, Director of Technical Communication and Social Media at AVST ... - Sky Broadband Support – Are they taking the mickey, or what? - 22 June 2010
Over the past few days my broadband connection from Sky Broadband ("up to 20 Mb/s" so they claim) has been getting steadily more of a bad joke. In the mornings it's workable (today I was generally getting around 2.5 Mb/s ... - Don’t sweat the spelling – they can read it just fine! - 22 June 2010
Lots of people get all fretted up about grammar. The Grammar Nazis of this world continue to put the frighteners on the many who are impressed by rules known only by the few. But, since you're reading this, you're ... - Tech writer: a rose by any other name … - 19 June 2010
There's a Russian saying I once heard at a funeral. It goes like this: A loved child has many names. I'd like to think that maybe the multiplicity of titles given to people who ... - EasyListener resurrected - 18 June 2010
One of these days browsers will be able to play audio files natively. You'll just be able to write an audio element in the HTML, point it at either an audio file, or a list of audio files, or an ... - Tech Writers Need to Learn to Say Yes. However … - 17 June 2010
Our Sales Director phoned me up today and asked for help with some bid work that's coming up. I've already rearranged my plans for next week to help someone else with some other bid work, so I apologised and said ... - The four levels of software support - 14 June 2010
In a recent post on the Cherryleaf Technical Authors Blog, Ellis Pratt describes four levels of support that users turn to when they need help using a piece of software. I'm not sure I agree with the order ... - Does online help need an overall structure? - 13 June 2010
The way I learned to write documentation was that you started work on a new project by spending a decent amount of time getting to know your subject matter. I don't mean getting to know the software, I mean getting ... - Documentation the ScreenSteps way - 12 June 2010
I'd never heard of ScreenSteps until I got a comment on my previous blog post on putting the technical writer in touch with the software user. Greg DeVore of ScreenSteps pointed me to a post he wrote about getting the ... - 5 Steps to Improving Your Software Documentation - 12 June 2010
The guys responsible for ScreenSteps talk some good sense about how to create effective documentation: http://www.bluemangolearning.com/blog/2010/05/who-should-write-your-software-documentation-not-tech-pubs/ I feel like I could have written this myself! ... - What online help needs is really good search results - 11 June 2010
Tom Johnson recently wrote a really though-provoking post about the scope of help content. What you’re reading here is based on a comment I added to Tom’s post. Tom describes helping out with user support for an application. He ... - Tips for document collaboration - 23 May 2010
Some tips for document collaboration from the Agilewords Blog. I'm not sure I'm sold on Agilewords. How's it better than all the countless other ways of doing shared documents? How's it better for reviewing than Acrobat Pro? ... - ITauthor podcast #34 – Testing testing 123 - 23 May 2010
Test Manager Richard Paterson joins Graham Campbell and me over lunchtime sandwiches in a rather noisy office to talk about software testing. Technical writers in a software development department often feel like third-class citizens, with programmers as the top-dogs ... - Make Radio - 13 April 2010
A page full of links to great information about making audio content for radio:<br><br> Make Radio | This American Life ... - Remembering my first computer - 9 April 2010
I bought my first computer in 1989. I was studying for a Publishing degree and we used the little, all-in-one, Apple Macs, with tiny black and white screens, for writing essays and doing page layouts in Aldus PageMaker (not easy ... - I love Emma Thompson - 4 April 2010
I've just been for a run: round the loch, up the hill and through the woods at Bonally, with Lottie (my dog). I was listening to Emma Thompson on Desert Island Discs. I love it when someone you've really ...
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