A new year and a new set of challenges await me both here on this blog, and professionally.

I’ve signed up to Project 52 in the hopes that it will help me maintain at least a regular level of content here. With quite a few side projects on the go this year I’m fearful of my time being sucked elsewhere so hopefully it’ll help keep things trickling along.

Professionally my team and I are keen to move things to a more web-centric output, and I want to get us more hooked into our Developer Community website and try and factor in some social media services as well. I’ve just finished writing an article for a supplement which will be published with the next issue of the ISTC Communicator magazine and it made me realise that it’s time to stop talking and start doing.

From that point of view it should be an interesting year as I truly believe that, for those of us who can, we need to start utilising the benefits of social media and really start to change how our profession is perceived. Social media is driven by information, and without doubt we are the best people to step in and adopt social media practices for the best of reasons.

I have an even greater interest in this area as, in the coming months, I’m going to be planning and creating a community website for the ISTC. I have many ideas already, and I’ll be canvassing ISTC members and all the technical communication professionals who I’m lucky enough to have visit this blog.

All in all it should be a big, busy year. Just as I like it.

Although why I chose to make my New Year Resolution “read more fiction”, I’m still not quite sure.

I have been remiss at writing new content for this blog, and whilst this topic isn’t one that I said I’d post about (those posts are coming, I promise), it’s something I was discussing yesterday and so is at the forefront of my mind.

Like many people I still use pen and paper when taking notes, and regardless of the type of meeting I stick with three basic categories.

1. [] Actions either for me or my team to do. Includes things that need done immediately or things which it would be good to do in the future.
2. ? Questions on things I want to learn more about, which relate to my team. Whilst these may also be actions (typically they involve asking people questions) I differentiate them because, until I’ve asked the question, I don’t know enough to decide on whether there is anything to be done (caveat: if it is a burning issue, I’ll like put this against both categories ? [] ).
3. I Information which covers all sorts of things from useful URLs, to quotes, to product names and so on.

I also “style” my notes, with the appropriate shorthand symbol first, then a gap, then the text for that item. Keeping that consistent makes it very easy to scan down my notes to process them.

[] email report to Fred
[] speak to Tina about next phase of work
? what is the cognitive learning project, who is running it?
[] write a blog post on the Information Strategy Pyramid
I stats for last week 103 open, 74 closed

Processing the notes, again, depends on the type of note.

For actions as, unless they can be done straight away (I think that is a GTD methodology thing? If it takes 1 minute to do it, and 1 minute to write it up and put it in a list, then you are better just doing it), they are transcribed into an online task manager application I use called Remember the Milk. It has a very nice iPhone app which makes it easy to “take my list” with me at all times.

Questions are simply a matter of being asked. That may drive further actions or information which are captured accordingly.

Anything I’ve noted down as information is either processed electronically, if it’s something online I’ll visit it and either bookmark it in my del.icio.us account, add it to my list on Instapaper (again, which has an excellent iPhone app), or grab it and store for later in Evernote (again, a useful iPhone app helps).

Whilst all of that seems like a lot of work, it’s very maintainable, and I spend less than 20 mins a day processing my notes. However it helps me keep on top of several different streams of work, and so far it hasn’t let me down. I’ve been using the shorthand symbols for a long time now, but obviously the electronic processing of these things is new.

So, what about you? How do you take notes? Are you a mindmapper? A random scribbler? Or do you, like one lady who attend a presentation I did a few years ago, do you draw out the subject and the notes in one go?

If you were attending a conference, and specifically attending one of the sessions that was going to be covering “blogging”, what questions would you want answered?

No, I’m not being completely lazy, I already have a good outline of what I want to cover (why, what and how) but it’s always good to get some “pre-emptive feedback” as a colleague of mine once stated.

On the flip side, those of you who already blog, any pearls of wisdom? Any information you wished you’d known before you started?

I’ll be publishing my presentation at the same time as I take to the stage at the Technical Communication conference in September and will update it based on any questions or comments raised during my session.

After all, for me, one of the main reasons I blog, and read blogs, is to exchange ideas and knowledge. The conversation is the power and I’m really looking forward to transferring my thoughts from here (on this blog) to the conference and seeing how a ‘live audience’ reacts.

BBC Radio 4 are broadcasting a 30 minute show on this topic.

Engineer Mark Miodownik presents an instruction manual on how to write an instruction manual, exploring the history and the future of product guides and how they chart our changing relationship with technology.

He looks at how product guides have changed over the centuries, from the very first examples, written by James Watt on his new ‘copying’ machine, to the latest Ikea pictograms.

In the first half of the 20th century, manuals not only described how to use your television, but also how to fix it. Now, the first few pages of any TV manual contain stern health and safety warnings about the dangers of tinkering inside the TV.

Mark travels to Yeovil to visit Mr Haynes, of Haynes car and motorcycle manuals, to ask whether people still need a manual to fix their vehicle. As our products get more sophisticated, is the instruction manual becoming extinct?

One to catch I think, hopefully it’ll be available afterwards online as well.

Taking a break from the Author-it, I’ve been playing with WINK, an open source tutorial and presentation authoring software. It’s quite nice but unfortunately I’ve been having issues getting the recorded presentations rendered into Flash.

So I’ve started to look about for other options, but there are so many options out there that I’m a little befuddled and overwhelmed.

We want to record some presentations that show off the new features in our product. A few of our developers have given a few of these to internal staff, but I want to get them recorded and viewable online in our development community website. Getting the recording software to do what we want is proving the biggest obstacle though, so it’s over to you guys and gals!

Do you record any presentations? If so what software do you use to record them, and how do you make them available online? Ideally we’d like flash as an output format but as long as it’s viewable we aren’t that fussy.

Any suggestions?

Due to product release pressures I’ve not had much time to look at the new version of Author-it, let alone get the SQL database setup so the rest of my team can get it installed and starting having a play.

Whilst we are getting some training organised, I’m confident that we are smart enough to figure out a lot of the basics ourselves (I’ve used Author-it before so can guide them a little) leaving the training for the harder things such as variants.

Having finally sourced space on a server my next task will be to setup the database on SQL Express. This is a cutdown version of Microsoft SQL Server, with much the same functionality but a maximum database size of 4GB. Some initial size estimates suggest we are WAY off that so I’m confident it’ll see us through the next few years worth of content creation.

Alongside this I’ve also been involved in what can only be described as a content audit across the company. I’m lucky that I have a colleague who is as keen as I am on making sure the right people have the right information, and that our information needs to be easy to find and maintain. She works in Product Marketing so there is a fair amount of crossover. At present we are mired in spreadsheet hell, but it’s starting to come together and, in the long run, I’m sure the various consumers of product information will start to see the benefits.

I do seem to moving away from being involved in new feature design work which I will miss, but for the meantime there is a bigger void that I’m aiming to fill with the ultimate aim of rounding out our product offering.

So, exciting times ahead and hopefully a lot of good lessons I can share with you.

Notes and thoughts from Day 1 of the User Assistance Conference

Session 1 – Tony Self – Emerging Help Delivery Technologies
It’s been quite a while since I heard Tony speak but as ever he provided an entertaining, if somewhat limited, presentation. Covering the various types of help viewing technologies he nicely summarised some of the available choices including the features to look out for, including the ability to wrap up an online help system in its own application (using technology like Adobe AIR). It was interesting to hear some Web 2.0 features making their way into online help technologies, including voting and commenting facilities which would give you direct feedback from the people using your help system.

Session 2 – Joe Welinske – Write Mote, Write Less
Embracing the Value of Crafted Words and Images
Another regular speaker and Joe was certainly fired up, challenging us all from the outset of his presentation to consider how we work in far more detail than we currently do. First up he suggests that we should be writing fewer words whilst making sure those words are correct and so lessen the impact on the reader, providing just the information they need and nothing more.

And then he hit on something that I’ve previously mentioned here (although Joe nailed it much better than I did), namely allocating writing resource to the highest priority pieces of documentation work, rather than the traditional approach of documenting everything. It’s a simple approach that, when combined with better writing, leads the craft of technical communications to provide much higher value to the business which is good news for all of us.

Session 3 – Sonia Fuga – DITA & WordPress Solution for Flexible User Assistance
A showcase style presentation of a stunningly simple concept. With a little bit of coding work (building a DITA importer to get XML content into the WordPress database), the team at Northgate offer a web-based help system which allows users to add their own notes and to vote for useful information, and which is can receive updates with new content with each release.

How? By using WordPress features. Notes are left as comments, votes are left using a WordPress plugin, and the updateable content is controlled by only allowing the customer (who has access to the WordPress admin screen) to create Pages, leaving the Posts controlled by Northgate. I use WordPress for this website, and spoke to Sonia in the evening to confirm some of the finer details. It’s a very clever use of WordPress, and I hope Northgate release their DITA importer to the open source community!

Session 4 – Question and Rants
A short session with four speakers each giving a two minute ‘rant’ and then taking questions. Nothing particularly noteworthy came of this but it’s a good addition to the usual style of presentations and made for a little bit of light relief.

Session 5 – Dave Gash – True Separation of Content, Format, Structure and Behaviour
Another familiar name, Dave is always entertaining and a very dynamic speaker and in this session he even managed to make the somewhat mundane topics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript interesting!

Outlining some basic principles he showed how you could take an HTML file, full of embedded behaviours (javascript), style rules (CSS), and content and strip out all four parts into a more manageable set of files. This way, holding the style and behaviours in referenced files, you can make changes to either and have them ‘ripple’ through all of your deliverable.

Admittedly this was all done by hand but the basic principles are something that you should be following if you have that kind of output.

Session 6 – Matthew Ellison – User-centred Design of Context-sensitive Help
Interesting presentation by Matthew which started a little slowly, covering the history of context-sensitive help before taking us onto the idea of task support clusters. Originally presented by Michael Hughes at the WritersUA conference, the premise is to offer the user a smarter landing page, referred to as Keystone Concept topics here.

The key to a successful Keystone Concept topic is not to limit what is presented, and to consider that it should be different depending on the context from which it was launched, with the ultimate aim of getting the user back on task as quickly as possible. This includes any form of tips and hints, and crucially suggests NOT to include the obvious stuff (don’t answer questions that users will never have!). This mirrors part of the theme from Joe’s talk early in the day, and certainly seems to be a sensible goal given the business (time and resource) pressures we are all under.

After that, I had a few beers and a chat with some other delegates, and as ever it was great to hear that most of us have similar issues, problems and solutions.

I’ll post my notes from Day 2 of the conference tomorrow.