In our inaugural podcast, technical communication and customer experience consultant Sharon Burton tells us about California law, offices without tarantulas, documenting the obvious, the file name field, buying buckets of DITA at the DITA Store, and the renaissance of content.
Mentioned during the show:
“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” – Dolly Parton
University of California Riverside
Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()
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
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!
Continue reading A News Site for Content Professionals – Contentcontent.info
I’m a fan enthusiast of Drupal. I’ve been part of the community for four years now, and the amazingly supportive community is what keeps me engaged, as I wrote after attending the Drupal NYCCamp earlier in 2013.
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.
Continue reading Creating a Drupal sandbox with VirtualBox and Drupal Quickstart (Presentation)
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.
Did you attend Lavacon? Were there other tweets you found noteworthy? Share them with us in the comments. If you missed out on the fun and overall fantastic presentations, Lavacon will be back at the Portland Hilton and Executive Tower in 2014. Continue reading Important and Irreverent Tweets from #Lavacon 2013