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)
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:
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