Technically Speaking

Not too long ago, I found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place. I work for a large organization (30k+ world wide workforce), and I’m just one tiny fish in a very large lake.

I was asked to provide help content in the form of a getting started guide for a piece of software that was going to be released world-wide.

I started working on the project using my tool of choice, a help authoring tool called MadCap Flare. This is a tool I really like, and have been using for several years. I’m something of an expert on Flare, so it is my first choice for pretty much any authoring project.

I started working within my group, however, and found that Flare wasn’t going to be the right solution for this project because of project constraints outside of my control. We have an in-house translation group that does all our content translation. They have their tools in place and are not interested in obtaining and learning to use a new tool (MadCap’s Lingo tool). There are certain strings in the project (specifically surrounding variables and master pages) that wouldn’t get sent to translation if they didn’t use Lingo. This project is going to go out in 24 languages, so simplifying the process is essential.

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Today MadCap Software released a new community-written newsletter. Up to now, if you’ve received one of MadCap’s newsletters, you’ll know that they have been written by people on MadCap’s staff. They have sales-focused newsletters and support-focused newsletters, but they have all come from the MadCap staff.

This new newsletter, MadNewz, will primarily be written by community members. The inaugural newsletter is a commentary post featuring ten “best practices” for single sourcing. (Read it.)

In this first newsletter, the author uses a conversational, informal tone that doesn’t sound like corporate-speak (which I think was intentional). It contains some useful information for current Flare users, the primary audience. This is a cool idea, as it will give community members a chance to contribute and let their ideas and work be showcased by MadCap. The bottom of the article includes an e-mail address to write to if you would like to contribute to a future article.

Some things I would change: first, the weird gradient background doesn’t work for me. It distracts me from what I’m reading, which isn’t great design. Second, it was only after I read the article twice that I noticed the author’s information in the sidebar. I would have preferred to see the author’s name beneath the post title. When I’m reading articles on the web, I generally tend to ignore sidebars because they generally include navigational information, or other content not directly relevant to the article I’m reading. I found it confusing that the author info was in the sidebar—so much so that I almost posted here that I was disappointed that the author wasn’t given credit. These are very minor shortcomings, however.

All in all, I’m pleased with the direction, and look forward to some quality community-driven content in the newsletter.

Once in a while it is fun to toot my own horn. Here’s an opportunity too good to pass up. This blog, Technically Speaking, was ranked in the top 50 communications blogs by the Bloggie Talkie blog.

I think it is an honor to be listed. I got a text message from my colleague, Tom Johnson, who writes another listed blog, I’d Rather Be Writing. We are both listed in the “Technical Communication and Science Communication” category.

Check out some of the other blogs on the list. And thanks to Bloggie Talkie for the including Technically Speaking on the list!

STC Summit this year was a great experience. It was my first Society-level conference (I attended a Region 7 Conference back in the day that they did regional conferences), and I had a great experience. I’m already committing to attend Summit next year in Sacramento, and I’ve actually already started working on a potential presentation topic for next year’s conference.

This was my first conference since the Twitter revolution changed how attendees interact with conference presenters. I loved using the conference hashtag (#stc2010) for my tweets, as well as for searching other tweets about the conference. Twitter was such a handy way to share short tidbits of knowledge we were gaining at the conference, it served as an instant feedback method for presenters, and it was a great way to connect with other people at the conference for evening social activities.

If you want to see a list of tweets about the conference, go to Twitter and search for the #stc10 hashtag, or just click here (I did the “hard” work for you).

One of my favorite parts of the conference was meeting, in-person, people from the tech comm profession that I have seen or interacted with online. I really enjoyed meeting everybody at the conference, and it adds a new dimension to the online conversation when you’ve actually met somebody.

I attended lots of interesting sessions. The presentations, by an large, were fantastic. Kudos go to the STC conference committee for picking such great presenters and presentations. For every session of the conference, there were literally 3 or more sessions I wanted to attend. What is great about Summit is that conference attendees can go to the STC website and view Summit @ A Click, where you can see almost all of the presentations from the most recent conference. This isn’t up yet for this year’s conference, but it will be in the next couple of weeks, and I’m looking forward to that.

As an almost-chapter-president, I thought the conference was inspiring, and it energized me for the coming year. I’m excited to serve the Intermountain chapter as the incoming president, and I think we are going to have a great year.

I’ve already reached out to our chapter members to inform them of the activities that are coming up, but I want you all to know that you don’t have to be a chapter member to participate. These events include:

• May BBQ and Social. At this pot-luck event, we will have social interaction with other tech comm people in the area. Feel free to bring your family. Please RSVP (see the link) so we can know how much meat to bring.
• June e-Learning Event. Lunch is provided at this half-day event where we will listen to three different presentations on e-Learning. Registration for this event is $15.00 (regardless of STC membership).

We will also be holding our annual business meeting on Friday September 17th in the evening.

I invite those tech comm professionals in the greater Salt Lake area to attend all of these events, regardless of your membership in STC.  We want to build a strong tech comm community in the intermountain area, and we need your help to do it!

If you are a technical communicator who pays attention to the latest releases of help authoring tools, you probably heard that MadCap Software released a new version of its flagship product, MadCap Flare.

I’ve been using Flare V6 for a couple of months now, and this review is to give you an end user’s review of the features and enhancements Flare V6 has to offer. You may be asking yourself if it’s worth it to upgrade your existing Flare installation to the latest version. Let me give you eight reasons to upgrade, if your budget allows.

Reason 1: WebHelp Mobile Output

Flare V6 includes a new target: WebHelp Mobile. This target creates a web-help output designed for mobile browsers, particularly the iPhone.

If you are trying to produce help content in a way that is accessible in the increasingly-important mobile browser market, this output format is exactly what you need.

To leverage your existing content in this new output format, it is as easy as adding any other target. You add a target to the project, and select WebHelp Mobile as the target type. The first time you add a WebHelp mobile target, you will also need to create a mobile skin. If you leave the default values, Flare creates a skin that matches the native iPhone skin very nicely. (There are actually thee different mobile skins to choose from including gray (default), slate, and green.)

Now, set your skin in your mobile target file, and build your project. In about 30 seconds, you’ve created a mobile-friendly target. The results look great:

Reason 2: Batch Generate and Publish

This is a feature that I needed about two years ago, and I’m thrilled to see it built directly into the Flare interface.

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