FrameMaker,DITA,XML authoring,PDF,CMS,Specialisation,MIF,cross-reference,WebDav,reltable,Publishing,Patch,Facing Pages Dear Framers I hope all of you have comfortably installed 9.0.2 by now. Though this was difficult... Mahesh Kumar Gupta

Thanks to Miranda Bennett for posting this on her blog a while back. As I struggle with trying to define what our New Normal for STC will be like, I keep wrestling with Phase Two.Michael Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06004741387594324547michaelhughesua@gmail.com2

This is a guest post by Cathy Wildhaber about her experience implementing a wiki in her department. Cathy is a technical writer in Kansas City. For the past 4 years, she has worked for a company that provides computer systems and services to financial organizations.

Ever take a look at some slick wiki technology and think “Wow, that’s really cool…I want one”? I did, and the results (an internal wiki for the documentation department where I work) were…less than stellar. Here’s how you can avoid my mistakes.

I had been working on a continuing education SharePoint site for the department. There was a wiki webpart available in SharePoint, and I became intrigued. What better way to help department members increase their knowledge about the profession than by harnessing our collective brainpower and talents! We could create collaborative summaries of training we’d attended! The intern could create a “new hire” section! We could have a knowledge base! How cool!

Wiki Dos (and Don’ts)

I immediately set up the webpart, learned how to create and edit pages, and provided a training session for my coworkers. I gushed about the endless possibilities, and then sat back and waited for the quality content to roll in. It didn’t.

Where had I gone wrong? Through the power of hindsight—and the research I should have done before I launched the wiki—I’ve come up with a few guidelines to follow next time. Perhaps you’ll find them helpful, as well.

Start with a clear purpose (a.k.a. Avoid the “if you build it, they will come” fallacy)

If you get starry-eyed over a wiki and then try to come up with ways you could use it, adoption is likely to be weak, as was the case in our department. If, however, you have a genuine process inefficiency or lack of resource that a wiki could help solve, you have a much better chance of success.

This phenomenon is best described by Mark Shead. He defines two types of technology users. Members of the first group identify a problem and then seek a technology to resolve it. Members of the second group, on the other hand, start with a cool new technology and then look for a way to incorporate it into their lives. When members of the first group adopt a technology, they are more likely to stick to it. Members of the second group often abandon the technology after a short time.

Prove how the wiki can benefit users

To embrace a wiki, users must first see how it will benefit them. Provide examples of how their real-world work could be moved to a wiki, and show how it could result in more efficient processes.

Ease existing fears about the wiki

People unfamiliar with wikis may fear that a platform in which any person can edit or delete any page will be chaotic. They may feel concern that a wiki could easily devolve into a free-for-all.

In a company wiki, the accountability for contributions and edits is much higher than in a major public wiki like Wikipedia—no one could leave anonymous spam. And while a small company wiki would likely not have the system of checks that Wikipedia employs, most small wiki communities tend to be naturally self-regulating. Chaotic editing and questions of ownership tend to be non-issues.

Provide proper training

If members don’t understand the broad concept of a wiki or the specifics of creating pages and setting up links, they won’t use it. Be sure to train users on what a wiki is (its purpose and what it’s good for) as well as on the wiki tool itself (how to create pages and set up links).

Don’t make it a chore

Don’t force the wiki upon department members. A lack of posts or edits by a particular member does not necessarily mean that the member is not finding value in the wiki.

Nurture your wiki

A wiki needs care and attention. Having an official “administrator” could imply that content is being policed, but you should ensure that someone performs a few maintenance functions:

• Introduction of a loose organization or structure (perhaps in the form of a home page that links to broad categories).
• Periodic checks to ensure that all pages can be found easily through links to a main page.
• Periodic checks to weed out any spam or mean-spirited contributions.
• Acknowledgement of good ideas, sorting of feedback, and implementation of suggestions.

Use metadata

To keep your wiki well-organized and usable, incorporate metadata. Metadata allows users to sort by category to quickly find what they’re looking for. Many wiki programs allow you to require that metadata be selected and allow you to define your own metadata. Other possibilities for metadata include content stages (can indicate whether the page is new, developing, or complete) or audience tags (can indicate whether the page is primarily for management, administration, or developers).

Broadcast updates

A system that notifies members when information has been added or changed will remind users that the wiki exists, and it will help ensure that the content is current, correct, and relevant. Notifications could come in the form of an RSS feed, or they can be as simple as an email alert. Users may prefer to receive a daily or weekly digest of changes, rather than notifications about every single change.

Encourage participation

A good way to encourage participation in the wiki is to enlist the help of a select few. You may select the most well-respected and established veterans of the department, or the enthusiastic early adopters of each new gadget, or the department members most willing to share their opinions. Often these individuals can pave the way for the rest. Recruit them to help get the wiki started; the rest of the group may well be more willing to participate after ground has been broken.

If you have a way of tagging or marking the good content you read online — such as adding it to a specific category on your blog, bookmarking it through Delicious, or putting the link on some other online site — send me the RSS feed for it, and I’ll add it to the Yahoo Pipes aggregated feed that I have going with Writer River.

Here’s what the Yahoo Pipes feed looks like at the moment.

Writer River Yahoo Pipes feed

It’s simple compared to other Yahoo Pipes feeds. Basically the pipe takes RSS feeds from as many sources as I add here, sorts the posts by the date published, filters out any duplicate titles, and then merges all the information into one RSS feed. Writer River then displays this RSS feed on its home page. When you subscribe to the Writer River RSS feed (or when you subscribe to Writer River’s email delivery or Twitter updates), you’re also subscribing to this same Yahoo Pipes feed.

I’m convinced that human-assisted aggregation and filtering, with the help of such tools as Yahoo Pipes, is the trend for managing the deluge of information online. Since everyone is an author, publishing on separate sites, RSS is the only way to keep up. And people are publishing like mad, pushing out about a million posts a day.

Post titles are often hit and miss in terms of quality, so some human filtering is necessary. We need people to pick and choose the good content from the poor. People are naturally doing this all the time. I’m just trying to leverage those efforts in an effortless way to pull all of this good information into one running feed. This is what Writer River is all about. It attempts to gather all of this worthwhile content and help you find better information more quickly. If enough people participate, the quality of content flowing through Writer River could easily surpass the quality of any print publication.

Here’s an example. I like UXMatters, but I missed the latest articles published on it because I have hundreds of feeds in my feedreader and I don’t sit there watching feeds all day. However, Alistair Christie saw an interesting UX Matters article by Mike Hughes and posted briefly about it in his What I’m Reading category. I saw it on Writer River because Alistair told me about his What I’m Reading feed, and I added it to the Yahoo Pipe that’s feeding Writer River. I checked out the article tonight and immediately felt it was a valuable post. Without this human filtering and aggregation, I would have missed the post.

Now imagine if not just one or two people submitted similar What I’m Reading or What I’m Bookmarking feeds to Writer River, but dozens, even 100 people. It would be like having 100 researchers scouring the Internet for you, looking for the best posts available.

Here’s a little more math. Let’s say on average, the 100 researchers post one article a day to their What I’m Reading feed — one article a day they feel is worthwhile. In one month, that would be 3,000 articles.

Now of course not everyone has the same interests and tastes as you, so let’s say that only about 10% of these “worthwhile” articles are actually interesting to you. That still means that in one month, you’ll have 300 worthwhile articles to read.

Compare that to static print publications like the Tech Comm Journal, Intercom, the Communicator, or other print publications, which only have about 10 articles per issue, and you begin to see how valuable and powerful human aggregated content can be. This is the rationale behind Writer River. We now need more people to add feeds to it.

The manual method of going to the Writer River site and publishing a link to your post is somewhat archaic. It takes time and is slow. It takes effort. But the RSS feed doesn’t take effort. It only asks that you share your what-I’m-reading RSS feed with the Yahoo Pipe (by sending it to me, so I can add it), and then you don’t ever have to return to the site again. Content will just flow through the feed, however you choose to subscribe to it.

It makes sense to somehow mark or tag or bookmark or post or share or tweet good content that you read, right? You want to hang on to that article somehow so that you can find it later. That’s the nature of reading. But for online content, you need a method for keeping track of it, because the World Wide Web is too deep and wide and slippery to find something again after letting it go.

For those people who don’t have a blog or Delicious account, or Identi.ca or some other way of posting or marking content, I recommend starting one. One of the easiest ways to keep track of your good reads is through a WordPress.com blog, which is free, requires no maintenance, and provides you with an easy-posting bookmarklet that allows you to quickly add a link in two clicks from any page you’re reading.

Let’s pull together these efforts. Rather than having everyone run in their own direction, which accomplishes little, let’s harness all these individual efforts (which people are already doing) and turn them into a massive collective effort that dwarfs anything one simple person can do alone. Send me your category-specific RSS feed or links page and we’ll build an information machine that churns out the best content of the web without requiring you to do much at all to find it.

With all the talk about latest trends and avoiding extinction as communicators, and integrating web 2.0 and wikis, blogs, podcasts, and other interactive social media into help, it’s a good time to look at how Google — practically the leader of the web — does help.

Last week Google released Google Voice, a service that allows you to integrate all your phones into one number and includes a host of features, including voice mail, recording, conference calling, and other services.

To help users get started, Google Voice has a list of 20 short videos. Only the overview video contains animation. It’s certainly the video they’ve put the most work into, and it also functions as marketing collateral.

The other videos are fairly simple, with short looping background music, professional voice talent, and a read script. The defining quality is that each video is short, some as short as 25 seconds.

The videos aren’t integrated with the text help. So if you don’t feel like watching videos, you can’t easily read the same topic. Google Voice does have help text, but it’s on another page, only linked to from the videos with a tiny, hardly noticeable help link in the footer. It’s almost like one group produced text, another produced help, and they published them independently.

The video windows are small, under 500×500 pixels. The small video window allow you to easily move from one video to the next without losing your place in the site. If you click outside of the window, the window doesn’t automatically minimize, which is nice. You have to close the pop-up window to go back to the list of videos.

All the videos are pulled in from Youtube, so they’re shareable. After one video ends, you see a list of related videos, but the related videos aren’t other Google Voice videos. Instead they are other Google services. So the related videos somewhat fail if you’re trying to learn more about Google Voice.

You can’t comment on the videos, or upload your own, or do anything other than watch them. Unlike the Michael Pick videos on WordPress.tv, Google’s videos are somewhat boring. Except for the overview video, which contains an animated stick figure, they lack a sense of being cool. They feel a bit corporate.

Similar to the length of the videos, the help content is also short and to the point, but the help topics are too text-heavy, with almost no illustrations, diagrams, or screenshots. The pages are embedded on the web, and navigating the topics is somewhat tedious. A search field appears at the top of the help, but if you search for the word “videos,” nothing appears.

Glaringly absent is any printable manual. You can print a single page, but not a group of pages in a PDF manual format. Additionally, Google does not provide any kind of quick reference guide to get started.

You can’t comment below the help topics, but there is a forum. The forum allows you to be notified by email and see the most popular discussions. You can also read a Google Voice blog, but the blog, like the help and the videos, isn’t well integrated with the rest of the help materials. It somewhat lives on its own. Google’s blog also takes the backward position of disallowing comments and only allows linkbacks to the posts.

One interesting characteristic of Google Voice help is a lack of parallelism in the topics. Here’s a list of video topics:

• Call screening – Announce and screen callers
• Listen in – Listen before taking a call
• Block calls – Keep unwanted callers at bay
• SMS – Send, receive, and store SMS
• Place calls – Call US numbers for free
• Taking calls – Answer on any of your phones
• Phone routing – Phones ring based on who calls
• Forwarding phones – Add phones and decide which ring

The help topic titles are similarly unparallel. Usually help contains all verbs or nouns in a more parallel list.

My Analysis

Google puts a lot of effort in the overview video. That’s a smart move. When people want to learn about Google Voice, the overview video communicates the service in a catchy way, with more of Google’s branding. This video is probably watched thousands of times (a lot more than any other video), so it makes sense to go to the effort of including animation.

What I don’t like about Google’s help is the lack of integration between the video and help content. Not every topic deserves a video. Many times I’d rather read the help. And sometimes I’d rather watch a video. Separating the two formats so strongly is a poor usability move. The forum and blog also need to be more closely integrated with the other help materials.

Additionally, the lack of any printed manual makes me think Google has no single sourcing strategy. The help content is probably just written as regular text on each page. I would have appreciated the opportunity to print a quick reference guide or short manual, only because reading on the web is a nonlinear experience, and moving from one topic to another without any logical sequence can be tiring.

I also think Google chose the wrong voice for its videos. Google is playful, young, and irreverent. But the voice they chose is professional, corporate, scripted, and somewhat ordinary.

I’ve been thinking a lot about voice in videos. Professional voice talent is not necessarily engaging. It sounds professional, but a professional voice isn’t always what users want, even if it’s what they expect. Users want a voice that is friendly, engaging, conversational, and real. I wouldn’t even mind it to be a bit spontaneous.

Shout out to Balsamiq for believing me when I said I had a license but I changed laptops. They sent me a new license (thanks, Val).Check out their product Balsamiq Mockups. It's a low-fidelity wireframing tool that has an informal hand-drawn look. I have used high fidelity wireframe tools and one of the problems is that people fall too easily into pixel pushing if it looks like it's meant to be aMichael Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06004741387594324547michaelhughesua@gmail.com1

No this isn't a discussion of hyphenated vs. not hyphenated. It examines the difference between putting a PDF file on the Internet (what I call an on-line document) and having a truly electronic Web presence for that content (what I call an online document). Unfortunately, the two often get bundled together.I have a UXmatters column called PDF Manuals: The Wrong Paradigm for an Online Experience Michael Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06004741387594324547michaelhughesua@gmail.com3

I was recently contacted at work to be a member of the "Next Generation User Assistance Experience Council." The person setting up the group was somewhat apologetic over its long title, but I loved it. I thought it told a compelling story. In setting up a folder to start collecting files and such, I named it "Next Gen UAX."UAX, I like that! UAX carves out a special niche for us in the UX world. IMichael Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06004741387594324547michaelhughesua@gmail.com0

Beginning writers trying to break into the field of technical writing face a paradox: almost all jobs require experience, but they can’t get experience without first having a job.

In the past, I’ve recommended that beginning writers create documentation for any open-source project they can find, such as WordPress, Audacity, or projects on SourceForge.net. However, our organization now has about ten open source projects that would provide an ideal opportunity for entry-level writers to gain real experience in technical writing. These projects are located at https://tech.lds.org/wiki.

The open source projects are designed to allow members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka the Mormons) to participate in some of the technical projects of the Church. However, you don’t need to be Mormon to help out. In fact, not being Mormon may provide a more realistic technical writing experience, as you’ll be working in a world of terms possibly unfamiliar to you.

In contrast to other open source projects, working on the open source projects at the LDS Tech Wiki will allow you to interact with designers, testers, developers, and project managers. You won’t just be writing help documentation for a stagnant application coded long ago. Instead, you’ll be able to create real documentation for a handful of active, interesting projects that you can showcase to employers.

What kind of projects are available? Here’s a page where all the projects are listed. The projects include the following:

• EBuilder Application
• Church Historical Timeline
• Coda
• Bishopric Scheduler
• EBuilder Application
• Home Teaching / Visiting Teaching
• IPhone Scriptures Application
• Local Unit Website Project
• Mormon Channel iPhone Application
• Recreation Properties Application

You can include any help materials you write for these applications in your portfolio. Trust me that a strong portfolio can trump years of experience as a technical writer. I landed my first job as a technical writer because I had a strong portfolio, which didn’t even include any real technical writing projects. Imagine how persuasive your portfolio would be if you actually had several technical writing projects you could highlight and discuss.

If you’re interested in getting involved, complete the requirements for participation. And then contact Tom Welch, the director in charge of these open source projects. (Alternatively, let me know and I’ll point you in the right direction.)

If you’re interested in learning more about the organization managing all of these open source projects, see Mormon.org, listen to audio at Mormon Radio, watch videos on the Mormon Channel on Youtube, or check out the resources at lds.org.

Trees, maps, and theorems, by Jean-luc Duomont

I’m currently reading Trees, maps, and theorems: Effective communication for rational minds, a new book by Jean-luc Doumont. The reason I wanted to read the book is for Jean-luc’s expertise in visual design and page layout, because I thought it could help me design better quick reference guides. Although very little of the book deals with design and is more geared toward engineers (the “rational minds”), he does address page layout and intuitive design in a couple of sections. Here are a few passages of advice:

• “Leave more distance between unrelated items than between related ones.” For example, headings should be close to the text they belong to, rather than equidistant between the last section and the new section. (This principle is termed proximity in Robin William’s Non-Designers Design book.)
• “Be visually consistent: format identical items identically, similar items similarly, different items differently.” This helps the reader understand and predict the relationships between the various information units at a glance.
• “To indicate hierarchy, display more prominently those items that rank higher or that are more important.” Again, in other circles, this would be the principle of contrast.
• “Make sure that each page guides the readers visually along a useful reading sequence or, alternatively, that it gives a clear picture of possible entry points.” This principle is especially important. A document without a clear focal point for readers can lead to a confusing design, such that you look at it and you’re not sure where to begin because you’re eye is drawn everywhere and nowhere (p.73).

Jean-luc’s book has a unique page layout itself. The format is large-print (hence the excessive cost of the book, $99). Each section is usually contained in one bifold spread (by that I mean across two full pages). But you read each spread from right to left. Two columns are on each page. The right column on the right page contains a general explanation of a principle. The left column on the right page contains a minimal graphic. The right column on the left page contains more practical application of the information. And the left column on the left page contains Q&A about the topic. Here are a few sample pages. It’s a weird structure, I have to say. There isn’t much flow from page to page, and I’m not used to reading from right to left. Still, it is consistent.

In “Achieving simplicity and harmony” (p.75), Jean Luc argues that with formatting, writers should use “a healthy dose of self-restraint” instead of indulging in the many layout possibilities that desktop publishing software offers. He recommends black for type color and white space as a principle means of adding contrast. “To make a piece of text stand out,” he says, “just set it apart: increase its distance from other items, thus surrounding it with space.”

Jean-luc also recommends using a single type-face with a couple of type sizes rather than multiple type faces: “Select faces within one family, as these were designed to work well together” (p.74). And he encourages left alignment of the text, with other objects below it aligned along the same left edge. You should only make the decision to justify the text if you prefer a more formal look and if the text blocks “align nicely with the other items on the page” (p.74).

Here I have to pause and make a small comment about a strange, almost OCD quality of the book. Every paragraph of Jean-luc’s book not only has justified text, but the last line of each paragraph ends perfectly justified as well, so that each paragraph is an exact rectangle, but there isn’t much extra spacing between the words at all. At times the content seems to have been written to fill a perfect block form. He doesn’t address this preference of his, but I remember some discussion about it at a presentation he gave at the STC Summit a few years ago.

As for color, he recommends minimalism as well: “Unless you master color design, use few colors, perhaps just one (besides black) in a few tints. Design the page in black and white first, then apply color in touches wherever it adds value” (p. 72). His book’s design illustrates this principle. Drop caps are orange, graphics are grey with a tint of orange, the sidebar is shaded gray, and everything else is regular black, with ample space in the margins.

Finally, he recommends avoiding underlining, bold formatting (within paragraphs), uppercase, and unusual fonts. Overall, Jean Luc is a design minimalist, preferring few colors and fonts and a consistent, simple page design.

As for the question of whether to design the layout before or after writing your content, Jean-luc says, “Logically, a text must have been drafted before it can be formatted, so drafting appears before formatting …. Still, the format might pre-exist or be designed before the text is drafted. Layout constraints, as on the length of texts, should be identified early, so the texts can be optimized accordingly” (p.72). In other words, you write before you apply format and design. However, it’s a good idea to know the constraints of your design before you start writing.

That’s about the extent of the discussion on document design. (He does have a lot to say about the structure and organization of content, such as putting your conclusions first and providing a table of contents, but that wasn’t my primary interest.) Overall, Jean-luc feels that advanced page layout, with multiple colors and font faces and a complex structure, more often than not comes across as amateur and conveys “visual cacophony” rather than an appealing layout. He prefers to minimize the “signal to noise ratio” by adding as little ink to the page as possible to thereby increase the focus on the content.

In buying the book, I failed to realize that I don’t fit the category of “rational minds.” The book should really be titled something like “Structure, diagrams, and reports: writing principles for engineering and science students.” The trees, maps, and theorems part is merely a cute way of saying this, or referring to hierarchy, table of contents, and conclusions. Most of the advice in the book addresses the situation of the engineer, who must write reports, give presentations, include charts and graphics, and create other engineering documents. It is not for people creating help materials, although there is occasional overlap.

Some sections are particularly geared towards engineers. Talking about charts, Jean-luc says “a slope (a ratio of two variations) is more accurate viewed as a direct linear representation of the first derivative” (p.129). Derivatives? Reminds me of calculus classes I took years ago.

Talking about the idea number for lists, he writes, “Four is a square (22): it is a combination of two binary options. Four is therefore a useful number of answers for rating scales (++/+/-/–), as it embodies a cascade of two binary choices: first, is it rather positive or negative; next, is it a little or a lot” (p.21). Huh? Are we talking about bulleted and numbered lists or quantum mechanics?

Given the engineering audience, one can’t hope for too much style and flair in the prose, but it reads like a college textbook, outlining basic principles in a flat way. It is too focused on “clarity, accuracy, correctness, etc.” (p.79) to make for a fun or engaging read. The start and stop motion of each bifold spread may make it accessible at any entry point, but it also gives you no lure to move from one section to another.

However, if you happen to be teaching a class on writing for engineers and scientists, this book might be just what you need.

I’m trying something a little new on my blog. Previously, every time I read a cool post, I submitted the link to Writer River. The problem with that, however, is that posting to another site isn’t such a smart search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Using the Writer River method, people who follow trackbacks don’t follow them back to my site (idratherbewriting.com), but rather go to another site (writerriver.com).

Additionally, it’s more beneficial for me to link to others from my idratherbewriting.com site, because it has a higher authority than writerriver.com. Links from higher authority sites are more beneficial in transferring search engine visibility than links from lower authority sites. For example, a link from NYTimes.com will push you to the top of Google results while a link from Sam’s vacation blog probably won’t have much influence.

So here’s what I did to better search engine optimize my site. I created a new section on my site called What I’m Reading. The page shows all the posts I’m reading (which I want to share), with short commentaries or summaries about the content. This way I keep the keywords and links on my site. I’m hoping that this strategy will create more pull back to my own site and will increase the rank of those I link to, more so than links from Writer River.

I didn’t want to limit my reading page to blogs only, because I read books too. So I used Shelfari, an online bookshelf site, to embed a few bookcases of books I’m reading, books I plan to read, and books I’ve read. If you buy a book through one of my Shelfari bookshelves, I will someday get Amazon affiliate revenue. It just made sense to consolidate everything I’m reading on a single page.

Technically, setting up this What I’m Reading page wasn’t that easy to do. The WordPress geeks can read on for the details, because this post is moving from conceptual to technical information. “What I’m Reading” is a category on my site hidden from the main page and RSS feed. I also excluded the posts from appearing in the Next and Previous links at the bottom of the home page (index.php).

I then used a custom category template, naming it category-1246.php, so that when users click the What I’m Reading category (the category ID is 1246), it opens category-1246.php rather than category-php or archives.php, which is the generic template for all categories. With this custom category template, I customized the sidebar, added some intro text at the top and inserted the javascript code from Shelfari to display the bookshelf widgets.

In the custom category template (category-1246.php), I also hid the post title and manipulated the styles a bit. I hid the title tag because I’m using the WordPress Press It bookmarklet to quickly and easily post links from the articles I’m reading while viewing the articles (rather than logging in to my WordPress dashboard to post them). The Press It bookmarklet automatically creates a link to the article I’m reading, so I didn’t want this link to be redundant with the title of the post—hence I removed the title from the category-1246.php template.

However, here’s where it got tricky. Trackbacks are one of my main SEO strategies, because most people are curious to know what you’re writing about them, even more so than what you add in the comments below their posts. A trackback sends a notification to the original blog authors that someone has linked to them. It’s like tapping them on the shoulder and saying hey, this is what I’m writing about you.

The problem is that a trackback’s link opens the single post template (single.php) rather than the category-1246.php template I customized. This leads to a major shortcoming of WordPress: you can customize category.php, but not single.php.

With a little research, I found a script that I could insert into my functions.php file that gives me the same functionality with single.php as category.php, so I then created a custom single-1246.php that matched category-1246.php, and I added a note at the top letting people know a bit about the page, because I didn’t want people thinking I was scraping their feed (according to Feedburner, about 100 people are scraping [stealing and reposting] my RSS feed). My short commentary and summary next to their links also helps avoid the appearance of scraping.

I also created a custom RSS feed and email delivery option for content specifically on my What I’m Reading page. However, I wanted the posts to update my regular Twitter feed (where I have most of my followers). Using Twitterfeed, I pointed the secondary RSS feed to my main Twitter account, so now I have two feeds pointing to my Twitter account. When my main feed updates Twitter, the tweet is prefaced with New Post. When the What I’m Reading feed updates Twitter, it’s prefaced by Recommended Read.

Now, there’s another complication. I’m not abandoning Writer River (a community link blog I started) by any means. I’m trying to move to a model that allows more flexibility and automated submissions. To accommodate this, I had to change Writer River a bit. First, because of all the spam that keeps seeping through, I changed the default registered user role to Contributor (which means I’ll have to approve their drafts first). For people I recognize, I’ll keep their role as Author.

Additionally, the Writer River home page now shows an aggregated RSS feed rather than links to the direct Writer River posts. The aggregated RSS feed displays results from my What I’m Reading category feed, the Writer River feed, and anyone other “good-reads” type feeds that people want to submit to me. The items in the feed are sorted by date.

To aggregate the feeds, I used Yahoo Pipes, which allows you to create and filter and apply rules to large numbers of feeds, and then spits out a single RSS feed from those multiple feeds.

I created a page on Writer River called Latest Posts, and I set this as the home page of the site rather than a reverse chronological list of only the latest posts from Writer River. (You can do this with WordPress through the Settings > Reading options.) On this new Writer River home page, I used the Simplepie plugin for WordPress to parse and display the Yahoo Pipes feed.

The benefit of displaying an aggregated Yahoo Pipes feed on Writer River rather than just content posted to Writer River is that it allows every blogger to do what I’ve done with my What I’m Reading page. Bloggers can simply designate a category that says “Recommended Reads” and select it when they post links to something worth reading.

I guess this assumes the bloggers would also be on WordPress, because WordPress has feeds for each category by default. For example, the feed for my What I’m Reading category is http://idratherbewriting.com/category/whatimreading/feed. I’m not sure if the same is true for Blogger and other platforms.

So if you’re a blogger and you have a category for good-reads, or something similar, let me know what the RSS feed is and I’ll aggregate it with the Writer River Pipes feed.

Finally, to encourage people to share links on Writer River, I created a Spring Widget, which is a little RSS reader that anyone can embed in the sidebar of their blog. To get the code for the Spring Widget, just click the Get this widget link below the Spring Widget.

I want to personally thank Alistair Christie, a tech comm. podcaster and blogger in the UK, for providing feedback and advice on how to handle the Writer River setup. If anyone else has suggestions for me, please let me know.

By Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler Community

The pace at which technological innovation occurs is amazing. The last 20 years have been jam-packed with paradigm-shifting technological advances that have altered forever the way we create, manage, and deliver information. The personal computer, the World Wide Web, desktop publishing, touch-screen mobile phones, interactive television, social networks, and wireless connectivity have transformed not only the way consumers interact with content, but these advances have also altered the way professional communicators work.

Nowhere are these changes more evident that in the world of technical communication. Technical writers and editors have been forced—like it or not—to move to a more formal method of creating content, often for a global audience. Gone are the days of the free-for-all approach to creating technical documentation products one-at-a-time using desktop publishing tools. While this technique was the best method possible in the 80s and 90s, today, those who create user manuals, online help systems, and other types of documentation are increasingly expected to take a more formal approach to content creation, utilizing content standards like the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) - the subject of DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers, a new book from the folks at The Rockley Group.

The advent of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and rapid adoption of topic-based content standards like DITA have forced us to separate content from format and end our addiction to desktop publishing. Today, technical communicators must learn to write modular, topic-based, context-independent content using a new breed of authoring tools. It’s not an easy change for many. The resources available are often poorly conceived, confusing, jargon-laden collections of information that don’t make learning new skills and techniques easy. In fact, they make things much harder than they need be.

That’s why DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers ($9.95 immediate download; $25.21 paperback) by Ann Rockley, Steve Manning and Charles Cooper is such an important work. Simple, easy-to-understand, and loaded with practical examples that resonate with technical communicators. Rockley and team have consolidated years of experience helping folks just like you make the move from unstructured content creation to DITA. This work is the result of their efforts and a valuable contribution to the technical communication literature.

Go ahead, take a peek. It’s not as scary as you might think.

State of the ark: A phrase I coined (I think) to represent feeling that the technology you are using is so cool when in reality it is like so yesterday.For example, I got a new phone this weekend that I think is neat because it slides open, and I can display my wife's picture and have a special ring-tone when she calls. Other than that, it just makes and takes calls. Someone wanting to mock my Michael Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06004741387594324547michaelhughesua@gmail.com1

Everytime we pass a restaurant that has gone out of business and been converted into office space, my wife comments that they must have one really great employee break room. Wow! A break room with a walk-in freezer, pizza oven, and deep fat fryer.Howard Speck added some really great rules to my earlier blog Why did it take me so long long to learn... I especially love "Never argue with an idiot,Michael Hugheshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06004741387594324547michaelhughesua@gmail.com0

Last Sunday we celebrated Father’s Day. I don’t know if this is a global holiday, or if it’s just a U.S. holiday, but reading an article in the Father’s Day edition from the New York Times made me think about my role as a father.

I am a lot of different things to different people. To some, I’m a blogger and podcaster. To others, I’m an employee and team member. To others, I’m a church member and scout leader. To others, a basketball player. To others, a friend. To my wife, a husband. But to three young girls, I’m a dad.

In the NY Times article, Michael Winerip explains that some years ago, he was putting in 11 hour days with a 2.5 hour daily commute. When he finally arrived home in the evenings, his children would catch just a glimpse of their father before bedtime. Winerip was upset about missing his kids grow up. And his wife felt like her career was suffering due to being off track as a stay-at-home mother. So they switched, and he became the stay-at-home parent to raise their children while she worked.

A while back I wrote about this dilemma in my post Telecommuting into Nonexistent Worlds. If my wife suddenly wanted to work outside the home and could support us, I would trade roles in an instant. But things being as they are, that reversal probably won’t happen anytime soon.

But that doesn’t mean that, as a father, I can’t get more involved in my kids’ lives. Winerip says the great barometer of parental involvement is whether you plan your kids’ birthdays or whether you just help out.

A few weeks ago, I had a memorable conversation with my eight-year-old daughter (Sally on Jane’s blog). Jane was upset with me for having skipped her brother-in-law’s graduation, and for a few days I was in the metaphorical doghouse that all husbands are sometimes placed in.

In the doghouse, I spent a couple of evenings at the park with the kids. One night, I was sitting on a grassy knoll next to Sally watching baseball (the other kids were rolling on the hill), and I started to ask Sally her opinion on a range of dilemmas I was facing, everything from how to get out of the doghouse to whether I should keep doing WordPress consulting to whether I should attend a certain event I didn’t want to attend. I had a lot on my mind that day and decided to do a role reversal: rather than be the parent always giving advice, I asked advice from Sally.

To my surprise, she had solid advice for every question I asked her. It caught me off guard at first. She was really smart. What I thought was complicated, she stripped down to the basic question in a few seconds and told me what to do. The wisdom of a child. The questions weren’t complicated to her; she didn’t deliberate about the dilemmas and weigh pros and cons of each option. They seemed like such simple decisions to her. She even laughed a few times while giving me answers.

In a way I’m grateful for being in the doghouse those evenings, because it changed how I acted as a parent. I still continue to ask Sally for her advice. For example, after I wrote a draft of my Lifelines to the STC post, I felt uneasy about it. The original version was quite a bit more negative. I asked Sally if I should publish it. She asked me if the STC was something I wanted to continue or something I wished would end. If I wanted it to continue, she said I should soften my post. I ended up rethinking some of my points and softening the post, and I’m glad I did. Thank you, Sally!

After this role reversal experience, I feel more respect for my children. They aren’t just little people needing my full attention and parenting; they are smart little people who see the world in clearer, simpler ways than I do. I don’t know if I ever possessed the same uncanny commonsense when I was a child, but if I did, it’s something I would like to regain. Perhaps this is one reward for being a father—having the gift of children to show you what you lost.

Five Steps to MadCap Flare, by Lorraine Kupka and Joy Underhill, gives you the basics and the insider tips for success with your Flare projects.

Scriptorium has published just released the third edition of its popular reference, Technical Writing 101: A Real-World Guide to Planning and Writing Technical Content.

Vasont announced the release of the next major version of their content management system, Vasont 12, that enables users to store multilingual content once for maximum reuse and delivery to multiple channels.

This case study describes how Microsoft HSG is using MadCap Flare to streamline the publishing of print and online documentation for the newest version of its Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS) 2009, which was launched in April 2009.

Bluestream released Version 2.0 of Bluestream XDocs. The XDocs component content management system is a standards-based, DITA CMS meant to handle the management of content components.