Ed Marsh is an experienced technical communicator, a podcaster, a lover of beer. This site is the home of his thoughts, as well as the Content Content podcast.
I wanted to create an Outlook 2013 email rule to respond to emails sent to a specific account. The rule requires an email template. Not knowing how to create one, I looked for the help icon. And kept looking. I felt old. And as a tech writer, I almost, almost yearned for the days of Clippy.
Then, in the top-right corner, it appeared. Sort of. Now don’t get me started about the ALL CAPS MENUS in Office 2013 (and also Adobe’s Creative Suite), but it’s surprising how the help icon is almost an afterthought. Continue reading Microsoft Office and the amazing shrinking help icon→
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I’m proud to announce a site I developed for content and communication professionals is live, called contentcontent.info. It’s a site that aggregates news from the most popular blogs and news sites for content professionals. You can currently get content and design news from 30 sites and counting. You can add your blog or your favorites today!
As I started a new personal project that I hope to launch soon, I wanted to use it as a learning experience not only for myself, but for the Drupal community. Though I’m active in the Northern New Jersey Drupal User Group, I’ve been largely a consumer of the group’s knowledge (other than sharing my knowledge of beer). I wanted to give back, especially as this year our host, the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, is moving a lot of their tech infrastructure to Drupal and their computer science students are showing an interest.
When I decided to create the site, instead of creating it on a web server with all of the typical installation and configuration issues (and expense), I started with a free, open-source software called VirtualBox, and the Drupal Quickstart project, both of which I could run locally on my Windows PC. From this, I created a short presentation that I shared with the NNJ Group.
I love Evernote, the popular, cross-platform note-taking application. I use it on all my devices (desktop, Android phone, and iPad) for many reasons:Organize your conference notes with notebooks and tags. Include photos directly into your session notes. Evernote automatically adds the date and location!
A to-do list note for every day of the week.
Shared shopping lists with my significant other, using the Premium version (I firmly believe in supporting products I use regularly. It’s well worth the $45 per year; that’s $3.75 a month, kids, less than two cups of Starbucks coffee).
But there’s one more possibly overlooked use for Evernote that I find invaluable: conferences. I attended three conferences this year, including the Drupal NYCCamp and the huge Lavacon conference (see my Lavacon-related posts here and here), with nothing more than an iPad.
It used to be that you had to lug a laptop around — in addition to pen and paper — to take notes from each conference session, but no more! So what makes Evernote so useful at conferences? Continue reading Evernote – the Ultimate Conference Tool→
Lavacon is an annual conference held in Portland, Oregon that caters to technical communication and content strategy professionals. Not surprisingly, this group generated a flood of tweets on Twitter using the hashtag #lavacon. Below are some of the most helpful and hilarious tweets I saw over the week; you can see the full fire hose by searching on Twitter for #lavacon.
As a frequent and fervent tweeter, I found Twitter to be invaluable in a conference setting. Not only did I gain insight on sessions I didn’t attend, I found new friends and colleagues simply by sharing an experience on Twitter. I also finally met people in person that I only knew through tweets.
