Your policy and procedures manual as software

Jared Spool tweeted this morning: PLEASE, PLEASE! Tell me that Apple is going to release Hypercard for the iPad! — Jared Spool (@jmspool) September 9, 2014 HyperCard was a hypertext program that came with Apple Macintosh in the 1980s. It allowed you to create “stacks” of online cards, which organsiations used to create some of the first… Read more »

Writing troubleshooting topics

It’s a fair bet that the introduction of the new Troubleshooting information type into the DITA 1.3 technical authoring standard will affect how all Technical Authors write troubleshooting topics, regardless of whether they use DITA or not. That’s because the proposed elements for troubleshooting topics make good sense, and it offers a standardised approach to writing… Read more »

Reputation Management – Can user documentation help quash rumours?

In the ‘Whispers’ episode of BBC Radio Four’s Digital Human programme, Aleks Krotoski explores how rumours spread both online and in the physical world. As an example, she looked at how two people were able to spread a rumour that a tiger was running loose in London during the 2011 riots. Hope untrue!! RT @Twiggy_Garcia: #LondonRiots… Read more »

The big questions in technical communication

David Farbey wrote a semi-existentialist post on the challenges for technical communicators yesterday. I’d like to look at the issue in a different way, by looking at the big questions in technical communication today. The answers to these questions (which may be decided by people outside of the profession) are likely to affect the future… Read more »

Topic-based authoring: The undiscovered country

Many software companies, when they start out, provide user documentation as downloadable PDFs or as web pages. As they develop more products and versions, and as they expand into countries that use different English spellings, the amount of documents can grow until it becomes hard to keep all of these documents up to date. It’s at… Read more »