I loved the Skuut when we bought it because of its all wood design, and the way it teaches young kids to balance on the bike before they are ready to learn to ride a bike. It is a perfect ride for a 2-4 year old, and the seat is adjustable, so it can grow with him.

Since the first of the year, since we are in our new house, Nathaniel has re-discovered his Skuut, and he absolutely loved it for the four or five days he got to use it. Then the wood cracked and the handlebars fell off:

My wife contacted Skuut wondering about replacement parts. The representative had us send some pictures of the problem, and then they wrote back saying they would replace the entire bike for free, including free shipping to our house. What great customer service! It’s refreshing to see a company who cares about (1) their customers and (2) the quality of their products.

Our replacement Skuut arrived yesterday and today my little guy is out riding his heart out again, and loving it. Thanks Skuut for caring about your customers and making this a great experience for us.

If you are looking for a quality bike product for a toddler or pre-schooler, I recommend you check out Skuut. It’s a great product from a great company with fabulous customer service.

Thanks Skuut!

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Please note, Skuut did not ask me to write this review, nor did they know that I had a blog. I chose to write the review because I value companies that have great customer service. I did receive a free Skuut replacement, but only because the previously purchased one was broken–not as compensation for providing any kind of review.

Here is what we know: the new device will run the iPhone OS (albeit an updated version). The iPad will have an option for unlimited wireless 3G connectivity (again from AT&T) for $30 bucks a month (or a limited plan for around $15 per month). If you don’t want 3G connectivity, you can purchase the non-3G version and just connect over wireless networks.

Steve Jobs, Apple CEO and presenter at today’s announcement, says that the iPad is thin and lighter than any netbook. In the $500 to $1000 price space, they are competing against similarly priced netbooks or low-end laptop computers. The iPad also comes with iBook – essentially an e-book reader, which puts iPad in direct competition with devices like Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader.

Essentially, it seems, iBook is a Kindle with the iPhone interface. Apps written for iPhone/iPod touch will run on the iPad, and Apple will roll out new apps (and released a developer’s SDK today so app writers can begin creating apps specifically for the iPad) so you can do word processing, spreadsheet data entry, and more on iPad.

But the question I keep asking myself is, “why?” I mean, Apple has been telling us for years now that smaller was better. Each version of the iMac seemed to get smaller. Each version of the Mac Book Pro got thinner. Apple even rolled out the Mac Book Air, and amazed us with a laptop that can fit in an manila envelope. Then Apple sold us on the iPhone and iPod touch, showing us that we can take the Internet, a bunch of very useful apps, and tons of our data everywhere we go.

Now Apple wants us to believe that bigger is better. Isn’t the iPad essentially an up-sized iPod touch (with optional 3G connectivity)? But are you going to carry the thing around with you wherever you go? That is what I love about my iPod touch–it goes with me everywhere. It is my PDA, it’s my music player, its my e-book reader, my e-mail client, and my portable gaming device all in one. Now Apple wants me to buy an iPad that does all of that, but is just bigger?

It will be interesting to see if iPad takes off like the iPhone did. I’m certainly not going to be standing in line to get one. I’m just not convinced that it will make my life that much better than my iPod already does.

What do you think? Are you geeking out over the iPad? If so, why? If not, are your reasons similar to mine?

We’ve used Lassie since then as a second car to our 02 Nissan Sentra. However, due to the pending birth of our third child, we needed something larger than the Sentra. We’ll have three kids 3 and under, and you just can’t fit three car seats in the back of a Sentra. At least if you want both doors to close. Working with my friend Clip Palmer at Just a Car Lot we were able to get a fantastic deal on a 2008 Kia Sedona (pictured below).

That gave us three vehicles for two drivers and a garage that only fits two cars. Plus, Lassie has been having some plumbing trouble lately, and has been leaking oil and brake fluid. (In fact, the brakes have been failing on occasion, like the time I flew past the Walgreen’s drive through window; luckily there were no cars in front of me.)

Thus, we made the decision to support the National Kidney Foundation with a Kidney Cars donation. This is a great program, and I hope that our small donation can help out some people who really need it. So we had to sacrifice Lassie, but it was for a good cause. Click on the link below to learn more about the National Kidney Foundation’s Kidney Car program.

We live in a world with lots of avenues to get content for our projects. Several websites specialize in searching for media that you can download and use in your product. Just because you can find it, however, does not mean you can use it. There are legal requirements that you need to be aware of when you are using content created by somebody else.

For example, I can’t just do a Google image search and find any image and put it directly into my project. The person who created that image has copyright protection on that content. You can not use it unless you get a license to use it from the copyright holder.

When you are working on a project for personal use, you probably don’t have to be too worried about these restrictions. However, when you are doing work that will be used in any kind of professional setting or commercial setting, you have to be very careful how you use others’ intellectual property.

Take, for example, the case of NBC currently in the news. NBC is being sued for using somebody else’s intellectual property, without properly licensing it. A very similar thing happened at a company where I used to work. The company had been purchased by a larger entity, and was going through a re-branding. The new branding used a font that the company hadn’t licensed properly. When I read the license agreement and realized we were infringing on somebody’s IP rights, I escalated to the management, who had to pay tens of thousands of dollars to use the fonts the way they were planning to. However, paying those tens of thousands of dollars up front saved them potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in the lawsuit that might come from using the fonts illegally.

Since the work you create represents the company you work for (or your own company, if you are an contractor), you really need to pay attention to intellectual property issues to protect your company from being held liable for infringement.

Here are some tips for using intellectual property properly:

• When you use somebody’s material, be sure you get written permission to use it, including exactly how it will be used. If you are going to use it for commercial purposes, be sure that it is properly stated.
• Don’t just assume that people put the content on the Internet so it can be used.
• If you purchase stock photography, make sure you abide by the terms of the license agreement. Generally, you don’t purchase unlimited rights; normally your license restricts how the property can be used (if it can be downloaded, for example; or if it can be used on a T-shirt or mug).
• If you create something from scratch while at work, that work belongs to your employer. You can use that in your work product in any way you want. If you make a derivative work, you have to be sure you are licensed to do so.
• “Fair use” is a defense in court; it is not a legal protection, per se. Be very careful about saying “I can use this, because it is ‘fair use.’” You don’t want to get sued to prove that it is, in fact, fair use. When in doubt, don’t do it.
• Track your IP use. Many licenses to use IP include time restrictions; after a certain date you have to re-pay to continue to use the image. Be sure your organization is in compliance with these rules.
• When you use somebody else’s work, be sure you give proper attribution. In many cases it is required. In other cases, it is just the morally right thing to do.

A special note about Creative Commons License

There are lots of images available out there under a Creative Commons license. There are several forms of this license, but you need to be very careful if you use Creative Commons-licensed material because most Creative Commons licenses require “share-alike.” That means that if you use an image licensed with a Creative Commons license, your entire project must also be licensed under the same license.

That means if you are creating a help system that includes a single Creative Commons Share Alike image, then your entire help system may also be required to be licensed under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.

Watching out for others’ IP rights is good for the community. It means you can also expect your IP rights to be respected. It is the responsible thing for us to do, and as writers, we owe it to ourselves, our employers, and our community to make sure we are in compliance with intellectual property requirements.

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Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this should not be considered legal advice. If you have questions about intellectual property issues, please seek the advice of an IP attorney licensed to practice in your locality.

One of the benefits of my new job is that I’m working with an impressive team. I have great respect for every one of my team members. We have four technical writers, three trainers, and our manager. They are quite the group. We have Intermountain STC chapter president Ben Minson, the unstoppable Tom Johnson of I’d Rather Be Writing, and fellow Flare pro Derek Warren. (Derek’s mother, we discovered, is really good friends with my wife. They met while serving as missionaries in Russia.)

Recently we added a new component to our team meetings: Design Review. Every other team meeting, three team members get 30 minutes each to talk about projects they are working on, and they get to demonstrate some of the cool things they are integrating into the project. As a team, we look at the project and both learn from what they’ve done, and make suggestions on how they might improve the project.

Our first design review was this week. Captain Ben was out sick, so he didn’t get to present his work, but we got to see some of Tom’s work, as well as the work of Mike, one of the trainers on our team. I was super impressed with both of their work. Tom demonstrated how he was using a Wiki to manage documentation for a community-developed software product. Mike showed us how he created an online quick reference guide that used JavaScript and divs to hide content and only show the part that the user needed at that moment.

I found both demonstrations very interesting. It was great to see how Tom is working to involve the community in documentation of a community-developed software tool. We talked about the wiki as a documentation source, and discussed the pros and cons of using a wiki for documentation. Tom is up doing a presentation at a university in Idaho today and tomorrow, and he is going to see if he can encourage the university tech comm students to contribute to the project. I’ll be interested to watch to see how that develops. As for Mike’s presentation, I was very impressed with the professional quick reference website that he created in Dreamweaver. It made me re-think how we can provide quick reference material to our customers. We spent a lot of time talking about how you know when to provide it in a quick reference page format, and when to create a full help system, and I found that discussion useful.

I am going to like these review sessions. They are mentally engaging and it’s fun to see what other team members are doing. I think it will help all of us improve our current projects, and help us be better writers overall.

First, a little background on me. I knew while I was in college that I wanted to be a technical writer after graduation. I switched to an English major for that purpose, and picked classes that gave me a “technical communication emphasis”. I joined STC while I was in college because I wanted to connect with people in my field. I got a chapter scholarship to attend a regional STC conference, and had a great time meeting people who did for a living what I was studying.

When I graduated and began working, I joined STC as a regular member. For two of my three jobs, I had to explain to my employer what the “STC” bullet meant on my resume. Until my current job, I’ve never had an employer who would pay for conferences, so my interactions with STC have been limited to those in the local chapter, on the web, and through STC publications. I believe herein lies the problem that STC faces: STC’s value proposition has to be able to compete with what I can obtain from other sources, and do so in a compelling way.

I look at it this way: if the STC were to go away, what would I lose? Let’s take a look at the benefits that I care about that I’d lose:

• STC publications. I like receiving Intercom. I honestly don’t really ever read Technical Communication. I get the need for a peer-reviewed journal, and understand how this is especially important in academia, but the stuff in TC generally doesn’t seem to interest or affect me. But the reality is that most of the articles that are published in Intercom would get published in other forms (like blogs). They might not be on the same subject, but the information is out there, and will continue to be churned out by writers like my colleague Tom Johnson who are better bloggers than I. So, if the publications go away, I’ll miss them a little bit, but not a lot.
• Local chapter affiliation. I’ve not been very active in my local chapter until the last couple of months. I’ve attended a couple of meetings in the 5 years that I’ve been a member, but let’s be honest: like any professional, I’ve got lots of things competing for my time and attention. I have a young family that I really enjoy spending time with. When STC meetings conflict with personal interests, I’ve picked personal over professional because I haven’t seen tons of value in the local chapter. My perspective on that is changing as I’ve accepted a VP position in my local chapter, and I hope that as an executive team, we can find ways to make our local chapter more useful to the technical communicators in our region. Six months ago, I considered not being affiliated with a local chapter, but now I’m finding more value there. Maybe this is a resource like so many others that you get out of it what you put into it.
• SIG / STC online affiliations. The SIGs haven’t been really useful to me. I’m a member of one SIG that has never contacted me with information about the SIG; has never provided any information about lists I might join, nor provided any other benefit. The other SIG has a mailing list, but it isn’t the most active list I follow, and the questions that get posted to that list might as well be posted to other non-STC lists I follow. I’ve watched some STC community leaders create other online sites that don’t restrict their membership to STC members, but they promote these sites to STC members. I think STC loses value in these cases, because I might as well join the other groups (for free) than pay to be a member of STC.
• Salary survey. The salary survey on STCs website is now a complete joke, and I find it useless. I preferred the old method of self-reporting. While less accurate, I found it much more helpful than the current salary survey. I won’t miss this resource at all because I don’t use it. There are several salary websites I can use that provide as much, if not more, value than the STC salary survey.
• Job resources on STC websites. The jobs section of the Society web site has not been a useful tool for me. When I’ve been looking for jobs, there haven’t been any local listings. When I went to post a job, there was an additional $120 fee, which my employer wouldn’t pay because they were already listing on Dice and Monster. The irony is that we were able to post on the local chapter website for free, and the writer we hired found us through the local chapter listing. So without STC’s local chapter website, we wouldn’t have found that writer, but it’s not like there aren’t other job boards that tech writers and their employers are using.

So here is my question: if STC is going to remain a viable organization, what is going to be the value proposition? What will STC provide that I can’t get from other sources? And then I have to ask, how much is that worth to me? I hope STC focuses on what I can’t get elsewhere and does it in a way that is valuable and interesting. That is what will keep me, a “young” writer interested in the organization.

If you want to know more about what is coming in the latest version, check out my pre-release blog post.

I’ve been beta testing Flare 5 for a couple of months now, and there are some great new features in Flare 5 that you are going to love. In this review, I want to point out some of my favorite new features, as well as some of Flare 5’s other great enhancements.

Let me begin by saying that I love Flare, and I think Flare 5 is a great enhancement on an already great product. I am biased; I’m a certified Flare instructor, have been a VIP in the Flare Forums for 2+ years, and am a certified MadCap Advanced Developer for Flare V4. But being biased doesn’t necessarily make me wrong <grin>. I’m under NDA for this project, but I’ve received permission to give you a preview of what you can expect from the soon-to-be-released version 5.

Here are five killer reasons you should consider upgrading your version of Flare to V5 as soon as you can:

1. Workspace improvements in both XML Editor and Source Code View
2. DITA Support
3. PDF Target Enhancements
4. Relationship Tables

5. Other Enhancements
   – Topic Tool bars
   – Thumbnail Image Support
   – Text Redaction Support
   – Improved Performance
   – Conditions in Project Organizer
   – Backup Differences
   – New Toolbar buttons

I’ll discuss each of these features in the sections below.

Workspace improvements in both XML Editor and Source Code View

Flare 5 sports a spiffy new code editor with line numbers, color-coded tags, and easy access from the XML Editor. It’s also a lot easier to get to the source code editor, as there is now a button in the XML Editor.

When you are using the XML Editor, click the “Send this File to Text Editor” button, which is now in the XML Editor toolbar.

The code view opens in a separate tab:

This image is kind of small, but you can see that the code editor includes line numbers and color-coded tags. When you make a change and save it in the code view, the change is automatically reflected in the XML Editor (WYSIWYG) view. Flare finally includes a code editor that makes me want to use it instead of an external editor!

In addition, you’ll notice new formatting indicators in the XML Editor. These help you see where the invisible tags are in your source code. For example, the following image shows the Flare 5 XML E

There are three things in the screen shot that are new in Flare 5: First, spans are now identified in the XML editor. Look at the word “originally”; notice the blue brackets around it. These indicate that there is a span applied to that text.  This makes identifying spans easier. They (obviously) don’t affect your output, but when working in the XML editor, you can easily see where the spans begin and end.

Second, notice the condition tag that is applied to the “[5]” reference. Now when you apply conditions in-line as spans, not only does the background change, but now there is a box showing which conditions have been applied (just like you see next to content in the Content Explorer, or in other areas in Flare). This is a small, but very nice enhancement.

Third, Flare now shows you empty tags so you can remove them from your code. In the case of the image above, there is an empty <p> tag set. I can delete it from the XML editor, or I can open the code view to delete it there.

DITA Support

This is the headline feature in Flare 5, and for good reason. You can now import DITA projects into Flare, edit them in Flare, and then generate any of Flare’s output types. This is a groundbreaking achievement.

As with other Flare import types, you can continue to author in a native DITA application and use Flare as a publishing engine, or you can take existing DITA content, import it into Flare, and then use Flare as your authoring tool. In either case, you can then publish your DITA files directly to PDF, WebHelp, Word, FrameMaker, etc.

Flare 5 also has a DITA target output type. This means that you can export your Flare project as a DITA project that you could then transport to any tool that supports DITA.

This is cool for so many reasons, especially when you consider the implications of project collaboration. DITA is quickly becoming a standard format for technical documentation. Being able to export your project to DITA means you can send your project to anybody who uses DITA, with whatever tool they use, and they can open and use your project. If your localization team supports DITA, you can send them a DITA export of your project for translation. If you need to send your project to a client for them to modify at a later date, you don’t have to worry about tool compatibility, because as long as they can work with DITA, you can send them files they can use. And if for some incomprehensible reason you want to use a different authoring tool, you can export your project to DITA, and import it into some other tool.

This is the end of proprietary file types! Your content is YOURS to do with what YOU WANT. You don’t need to rely on somebody creating a transform that can convert MadCap’s content into an importable format for another tool, because you can create a DITA target.

This version of Flare does not yet support native DITA authoring. While you can get DITA in and get DITA out, the project in the middle is a Flare-based project with the Flare-based XHML source files. However, a future version of Flare is supposed to provide native DITA  authoring.

If you are using DITA, or if you are considering how DITA can be used in your organization, you ought to check out Flare V5, because the direction they are going with DITA support is literally awesome.

PDF Target Enhancements

Flare 4.2 addressed some PDF enhancement requests, in that it allowed you to modify the image compression settings for creating PDF files. That was a nice feature, since you finally got some control over how images would be compressed and how that would affect your overall file size. However, you still needed the paid version of Acrobat in order to set the metadata (like author, etc.). No more. Look at what is available to you now:

Now I can truly build and release without any post-processing. I run a script nightly that builds all my documentation and places it in a location where the software build script can pick it up. Now that script builds releasable documentation. That is awesome, and this is a small feature, but one that adds a great deal of value.

Relationship Tables

DITA supports relationship tables, so Flare 5 now supports relationship tables. The Center for Information-Development management has a good article that describes DITA Relationship tables. To summarize, a relationship table is a centralized location where you can link related concepts, related tasks, and reference topics.

In Flare 5 you can insert a relationship proxy into your master page, and then every topic that is linked in the relationship table will show the relationship in the topic, grouped by concepts, tasks, and references (if a relationship exists for that topic).

When you need to update these references, you do them all in one place: the reference table. There is no need to go into individual topics and tag them with a concept; no need to add “related topics” manually. You can have these appear automatically in topics with the relationships proxy.

I have only used this superficially until now, but I plan to use this feature extensively in my next project, so I’ll keep you updated on how it goes.

Other Enhancements

There are several other enhancements I’ve discovered in Flare 5 which include:

• Topic Tool bars
• Thumbnail Image Support
• Text Redaction Support
• Improved Performance
• Conditions in Project Organizer
• Backup Differences
• New Toolbar buttons

Topic Tool bars

You can now include a toolbar anywhere in a topic, which is pretty cool. Here is a skin I created for a project I was working on. I made tabs for the tool bar, and then I moved topic-specific stuff into the topic toolbar, which I floated right. So there you can search the topic, remove highlighting, or mark the topic as a favorite. Since these are topic-level tasks, it makes sense to add them to a toolbar that is in the topic itself.

This feature greatly increases the flexibility options for creating custom skins.

Thumbnail Image Support

Flare now supports image thumbnails. You can create a thumbnail class and apply it to your images. Flare will generate a smaller version of the image, and when users hover over the image (or click on the image, you decide), a larger version of the image can be displayed.

The help system gives detailed information on how to set up and use this feature in your projects.

Text Redaction Support

If you produce sensitive documents, Flare now supports text redaction. With text redaction, you can generate two versions, say of a PDF file. One can contain the full text, and one can contain the redacted text.

You might wonder why you would want redaction when you could conditionally exclude content. In some cases (particularly in government applications) it may be preferable to produce a document with redacted text, rather than just not containing the text. Additionally, when you redact text (instead of excluding it conditionally), the page counts stay the same in both versions of the document.

Improved Performance

Flare 5 sports improved performance, especially surrounding WebHelp target generation. I don’t have any hard numbers here, but it just feels faster. It also seems to have improved stability, based on my experience using it. I can’t remember a time during my beta testing of Flare 5 that the application crashed on me. That is a far cry from the days when I was using Flare 3, which (for me) seemed much less stable. (There was a time, using Flare 3 that Flare was crashing every day at least once, so for me, the improvements in Flare 4 and Flare 5 are fantastic.)

Conditions in the Project Organizer

You can now use conditions in the Project organizer. This allows to you exclude content from the Project Organizer, based on conditions settings in the target. So, if you have separate deliverables in the same project and you want to separate the header and alias files based on the target, you can–and you won’t get any errors when you generate the build!

Again, this is a minor enhancement, but it is one that will make things a lot easier for many people.

Backup Differences

If you use the backup options in Flare, you can now view a diff of the current version from the one that is backed up, which you can view in code view, or in WYSIWYG view.

New Toolbar buttons

There are two new buttons available on the toolbar or the topic toolbar. There is now a Previous button and a Next button. If the topic is part of a browse sequence, then the previous and next buttons show the previous/next topics in the browse sequence. If the topic is not part of a browse sequence, then the buttons show the previous/next topics in the TOC. (This won’t work properly if the topic is added to the TOC in multiple places, or if a topic is not in the TOC.)

Conclusion

Flare 5 is a great enhancement to the Flare product line, and includes more features than the ones I’ve listed. If you are in the market for a help authoring tool or if you are using DITA, check out Flare V5; it will knock your socks off. If you already own Flare, upgrade when it is available. Kudos to MadCap for coming up with a great product with enhancements that really improve the technical author’s workflow, making producing great content faster and easier than ever before.

Mozy has been great. It runs in the background and every so often updates the online storage with the latest files from my laptop. At under $5.00 a month, this is a solution that works nicely for me. I suppose, it is $5.00 of insurance because hopefully you’ll never need it, but it is $5.00 for peace of mind.

Like I said, I never expected I’d need it. Until last night. My computer had a catastrophic failure. I have no idea what happened. I hadn’t installed any new software or drivers or hardware for a couple of weeks (at least), but yesterday it failed to restore from hibernate. We ran several tests and it wasn’t able to fix itself.

Now, normally, I’d be panicking right now. This is the main computer in my house. It has all my writing for the book I’m working on. It has all the web work I’ve done including my backup files for my website. It has all my photographs and my music. I had over 60GB of data that was gone in an instant. But I’m not panicking, nor am I inhalint anti-anxiety meds. You see, I’ve got Mozy. And they’ve got my back.

Mozy is a great service. You download the Mozy client, and you tell it what directories you want to back-up. One folder I backed up was my “Users” folder in Windows, because that contains all my critical data.

Mozy gives you 2GB of backup free. If you want unlimited backup, it’s $4.99 per month (with discounts if you purchase larger blocks of time up-front). If you want to add a folder to the backup repository, but it isn’t already there, you can just right-click on the folder in Windows, and say “Add to Backup”.

When something goes wrong, you can either restore a specific file, an entire directory (including sub-directories), or in the case of a catastrophic loss you can request backup downloads, which get compiled in 3GB increments and which you can download from Mozy’s website. These backups are executable files that you can run to restore all your old files in their former locations. All of that is free (well, included in your monthly fee if you have more than 2GB of data).

If that solution doesn’t work for you, Mozy can even take your entire backup, burn it to DVD, and mail it to you. That is not a free option, but it is probalby the easiest option, and it is the option I chose for my data restoration. When I tried to restore my backup files, I was able to download several of the backups, but not all. I have high-speed internet (which, by the way, is required to use Mozy), but I think my ISP may have been throttling my speed after I tried downloading 15 GB + of data in a couple of hours. I didn’t have the paitence to keep waiting, so I decided that to restore all 60BG+ of my data, I’d request the DVD restore option.

Honestly, this option cost a lot more than I expected. They charge a base fee of $30 for setup, plus $.50 per GB for the media, plus $40 for shipping (Next Day Air, shipped via FedEx). So my restore of 60GB was just over $100.00. I understand the setup and media fees. I was dissappointed that the only shipping option was FedEx Next Day Air. There are many shipping options, and I wish Mozy had let me pick my price depending on how urgent my need was.

Now I await my restore DVDs. I am very happy that I selected Mozy’s service. Even though it cost me $100 to get my data back (because I dind’t want the free download), that is still a lot cheaper than what I would have paid to recover the files from my hard drive. And my music and images are worth the $100.00 restoration, because really, the photos are priceless.

If you don’t have a backup solution in place for your computer, I recommend you consider a solution like Mozy. It saved the day for me this week. When will it be your turn?

(By the way, I’ll write a new post after I’ve been able to restore my data, so I can tell you how easy/hard it was. Stay tuned!)

I follow lots of technical communicators and increasingly I’m seeing people reach out for help on the software they are using. That is really cool in some ways. I follow several writers, and I know several writers follow me. If I’m having trouble with a piece of software, I can pose a quick question, and one of my followers might have the answer I need.

There is a limitation, though. Since an individual post is limited to 140 characters, it is hard to give a detailed description of the problem I’m experiencing, and it is likewise difficult for somebody responding to give a detailed description of the possbile solutions. While technical communicators generally prefer brevity, you must be able to at least be comprehensive.

Today one of the people I follow asked a question about MadCap Flare and wanted to understand the conceptual difference between togglers, drop-downs, expanding text, and pop-up text, and wanted to know what the use cases were. I don’t mean to pick on this person, but it provides a good example for an issue I’ve been thinking about for some time now. See, I know quite a bit about these four features in Flare, and can provide a good explanation with use cases are. The trouble is, how can I do that in 140 characters?

Even if I dedicated a separate tweet to each of the four features, I’m still quite limited in what I can say, and how can I provide an adequate explanation and use case in such a short space? Plus, if I were to dedicate four tweets, I begin to clutter up my twitter feed responding to a single Twitter user, which is bad form and carries on a coversation that most of my followers probaby aren’t interested in.

I’ve seen several Flare users get product support from MadCap employees using Twitter, and I think that is nice for a quick question with an easy solution. Twitter, however, is not a great format for a detailed question that required specific exampled and detailed answers. In such cases, the best solution is probably to go to a related email list or forum where you can ask the question in enough detail that experienced users can provide helpful results.

Twitter can be a great tool, and can help people get answers quickly. However, when you have a question and need an answer, you probably ought to consider your question, and determine what channel is best suited for the type of answer you need. That may or may not be Twitter.