The other day one of our genius developers (I think his official ranking is Jedi Knight) asked me why we don’t provide the product documentation on a Wiki. I answered him stating that it was because I wasn’t allowed. That’s not strictly true.

My answer should have been that, quite simply, I’ve failed to provide a good enough reason to my boss (and my bosses boss) as to why that may be a good thing.

And the reason I’ve failed to do that?

Because I’m still not 100% convinced that it is a good solution for our product.

What is more likely is that, if we do decide to embrace Wikis (we haven’t managed blogs yet, but that’s another issue) we take a split approach and offer a knowledge base style information centre (something like the Author-it Knowledge Center) and host a Wiki as a way of capturing and sharing what I refer to as ‘grey information’.

It’s this latter set of information which, whilst it has always existed, has never really had a place to live until the internet came along. These days all it takes is a quick internet search and you’ll find masses of information, all generated by the users. Some of it is useful, hints and tips, ways to workaround product limitations, and clever uses that were never thought of by the manufacturer.

To me, that user created content is where Wikis hold their true power and finding the balance between that content, and the content provided by my team is still something I’ve to get my head around. Ultimately the argument (business case) for investing in the creation, maintenance and policing of a Wiki needs to be focussed on how much value we will gain (ROI).

On that basis it shouldn’t be a hard business case to put together, the tricky bit is making it such a compelling argument that it moves to (close to) the top of the list, and that will require a lot more discussion around why embracing Wikis, and blogs, will stand us in better stead in the future.

In my copious spare time I have been known to design and build websites. The first website I ever built was for the first company I worked for, back in 1996, so I’ve been at it a while.

However it’s only been the past couple of years that I’ve started to get some larger clients with grander ideas, and that has meant getting a bit more organised. As such I now have a standard questionnaire that I ask all prospective clients to fill in, a standard design proposal document which I use to present back my ideas based on the answers to the questionnaire, and I have a nice little area of my PC which is dedicated to building websites.

The key part of which is XAMPP.

I discovered this marvellous application about 3 years ago, and if you are building websites, or installing and customising anything that requires MySQL and PHP then you must give it a look.

Many people know from their own experience that it’s not easy to install an Apache web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl.

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start.

It really is that simple. Once you’ve downloaded it, start up the Control Panel, start Apache and MySQL, then head to http://localhost. Done!

A lot of my web design work is creating custom themes based around WordPress, sometimes it is just a look and feel but more often than not custom code is required. Now, rather than having to upload a file to a test web server somewhere, I can work locally on the php files, and just refresh the browser to see my changes. Much faster.

XAMPP is one of those applications that, after you’ve used it once you think “how the hell did I manage without this!”.

Given that a lot of technical communicators are looking towards other distribution models (blogs, Wikis and so on), then XAMPP is an easy (and free) way to get a test system setup, allowing you to run short proof of concept projects. I hope you find it as useful as I do.

No, don’t worry, I’m not going to subject you all to my dulcet tones but I would like to mention two sets of podcasts which are well worth monitoring.

Not normally something I make time for, I’ve recently started going to the gym and it’s an ideal time to zone out and catch up on these. For those of you using iTunes, you can subscribe to RSS Feeds for both and they’ll be downloaded whenever they are published.

First up a fellow Scot (even if he is from the ‘wrong’ side of the country :) ) Alistair Christie produces a regular podcast on a variety of technical communication related topics. He’s been at it for a few years now and has some excellent interviews which you can find in his archives. Well worth subscribing to this one.

Also worthy of a listen is the Tech Writer Voices sessions by Tom Johnson. He has interviewed many well know names in our field of interest and, like Alistair, has been publishing podcasts for a while now. His archives are chock full of fascinating interviews, and of course you can subscribe to his podcast series as well (via iTunes too).

Any other podcasts I should be listening to?

Firstly a quick thank you to everyone who has commented on the previous post. What a fantastic bunch you are, and as I mentioned in the comments, I’ll be using your first names and locations in an infographic for an upcoming presentation. Fame will be yours! (Note: fame not guaranteed)

In other news I’m deep in the trenches of 2000+ Author-it Topics, stepping through each one to clean up formatting, correct hyperlinks, set the correct template and so on. I’m working my way through all our old content, imported using the MIF Import. It’s not the most stimulating work but needs must.

On the way I’m fixing bits and bobs in both Author-it and the Word template that we’ll use to generate the PDFs of our documentation from. If nothing else the context switch is keeping me sane!

One annoyance is the fact that I’ve had to add a “Reset Numbering” paragraph style as without it you’ll find your numbered lists (that we use for procedures) roll on and on through your document. I’d have thought the Procedure Heading style would’ve been setup to handle this out of the box but, alas, not. So far it’s the weakest area for me, and I’d certainly love to see some more example templates, either provided by the company, or on a community submission basis.

I’ve also spent a fair bit of time dipping in and out of the Author-it Yahoo Group which is a fantastically helpful resource. Well worth joining if you are an Author-it user.

Right, best get back to it. Hoping to get that number below 2000 by the end of this week!

Dear Reader,

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to stop by and read my paltry contributions. Thing is, I was wondering if you could do me a small favour, it really shouldn’t take too long.

Could you possibly leave a comment on this post, and let me know where you are from?

That’d be great!

Of course, feel free to heap praise on me and this humble blog if you so wish, but, really, all I’m looking for is to try and capture the people who read this blog and are willing to comment.

Yours in appreciation and thanks,

Gordon

I’ve agreed to present at this years ISTC conference, and my topic will be blogging and technical communications. It’s a nice topic title, vague enough that I can stretch it in many ways, but specific enough that it has some natural constraints.

I’ll write up some of my thoughts here, naturally, but it’s interesting that I’m starting to see how other areas of the online world, the Web 2.0 vision of the future, are coming into play.

Case in point: Rhonda Bracey blogs about the presentation Tony Self gave, based on an article he wrote titled What if Readers Can’t Read? which I’d already read, and linked to in my monthly newsletter column for the ISTC. The premise of which is:

The fundamental shift away from traditional forms of written communication (books and documents) to new media (e-mail, social networking, collaboration spaces) is something that we as technical communicators should be attuned to. The shift is not just from paper to online media… the shift is also away from top-down, autocratic communication structures to democratic, peer-to-peer structures.

It’s an excellent, thought provoking article, whether you agree or disagree, and it’s made all the more powerful by some of the videos that Tony showed during his presentation, videos to which Rhonda has kindly provided links.

One of the videos is referenced heavily in Tony’s article so I thought I’d show it here as it’s quite a powerful message and something that should be shaping our thinking in the years to come.

Without blogging, I wouldn’t have come across this and this is a perfect example of why blogging can be so powerful, however you do need to be part of this online conversation to be able to catch these snippets.