In a few days, this blog content will go away when it’s handed over to the new Marketing fellow at MadCap Software. If there is value to you in a current post, make sure you get that content now before it goes away.
Thanks and looking forward to seeing you all elsewhere!
Posted by: Sharon
It’s a lovely late August morning in So Cal. The sun is shining, the dogs are playing, Current Husband just woke up.
It’s all good in the world.
I’ve added another webinar to the mix. This one is October 7th 2009. Ed Marshall is talking about breaking into the API market. This is a very requested topic and I expect lots of attendees. To sign up for this or other webinars, go to http://www.madcapsoftware.com/demos/webinars.aspx.
And remember, if the time or date don’t work for you, sign up anyway. We record these webinars and you’ll automatically get a link to the recording the next day. Then you can “do” the webinar when it does work for you.
I’d like to know if having these webinars about every other week is the right frequency. Perhaps it’s too often? Perhaps you’d like 1x a month? 1x a quarter?
If you could post in the comments what you’d like to see in frequency (or a topic you’d like to learn more about), that would help me a lot. I can better plan to meet your needs.
Time for work for me! I have client deadlines.
Posted by: Sharon
It’s been 5 months since I posted and that makes me the worst blogger ever. Now that I’ve accepted fault, let’s move on. Don’t hold onto the past.
You may have noticed the economy took a nose dive from October to at least March. In March, MadCap and I agreed that we should cut my hours. I still work part time for MadCap, doing demos, running the webinar series, and helping where I’m needed. But that’s a small part of my time now.
So that’s where I’ve been.
I can help you even more now.
If you bought Flare or Blaze (or other products) and are looking at getting the products integrated into your workplace, I can help. I can provide
I can help with small and large projects, at your site or off-site.
For example, I’ve been helping a company convert a lot of legacy RoboHelp content into Flare. This lets their writers focus efforts on generating new content to meet their deadlines. With the staffing cuts from this recession, this makes financial sense for them.
Contact me to start talking about how I can help you get productive.
The webinar series is back on after a short summer break. We have coming up:
Sept 9th Cascading Stylesheets (Part 3) Images
Oct 20th Task Analysis for Developing Policies & Procedures Content
Stay tuned for an API docs webinar about October 7th and part 4 of the CSS webinar series on October 14th or so.
We lost our other old dog in April. Lady went to sleep and didn’t wake up. She was 15 years old, blind and deaf. After a good long life, Lady was gone.
The Aussie was lonely and he wasn’t getting happier, so in May, we went to the local rescue shelter and found a new friend. Olivia (because an Augustus needs an Olivia) the Leonberger is about 10 months old now and a delight. She is a very large dog with a lot of puppy left in her. 70lbs of excited puppy. She’s the red dog in the photos to the right.
She hadn’t been worked with much, so we’ve spent the last few months doing basic training. Olivia is smarter than Gus and has picked up the training faster than he did.
She also loves swimming. And when I say loves, I don’t mean likes it a lot. I mean adores the water. Any water.
Gus and Olivia play chase attack kill and collapse in a pile together. They are both very happy.
We’re so glad we went to a rescue shelter to find our next dog.
Posted by: Sharon
Between losing Sara the Amazing Swimming Dog, WritersUA, and then getting really sick, I’ve just not posted for a bit.
So I thought I would quickly this morning.
If you have not been paying attention, the free webinar series is going very very well. The one we just did had the most signups ever. I was amazed.
The next one is April 23 at 9am Pacific.
Controlling Costs by Controlling Language
This tool-independent webinar shows how simplified language options can reduce page count, decrease translation expense, and improve comprehension among non-English audiences. But is it appropriate for you? Find out.
Presenter: Brenda Huettner, P-N Designs, Inc
Brenda simply rocks. She knows a lot about our field and this webinar is a great way to learn about controlled language. It may not be right for you, but it would be good to know what it is, in case it comes up.
For more info about the webinar series, go to http://www.madcapsoftware.com/demos/webinars.aspx.
In case you didn’t get to go to WritersUA, we’re in beta with Flare Dita. If you have Dita content and are willing to beat the crud out of the software, we want you to join the beta. Send me an email and I’ll pass it along to the guy.
Remember, no Open Toolkit, just Flare and Dita. Output to Webhelp, PDF, Frame, Word, Dita, and more.
See you all at STC International in just a few weeks!
By now you’ve heard MadCap Software released the new versions of Lingo, Mimic, and Capture. Good products, great updates. Our guys worked hard to do great products.
I’m not going to tell you all the new stuff here; you can click the links and go to our website and see what’s new. But here’s a fast overview of the stuff I think is cool:
Let’s say you have a screen movie of a tutorial for creating reports in your product. You have call outs, mouse movements, all that stuff. And then they changed the application – perhaps a new version. With MovieSync, you start the application, open Mimic, and re-record the movie. Open both the old version and the new version in MovieSync. Now you can specify to move some callouts, all the callouts, what frames get what, and so on.
Think of the time you can save by not having to manually re-do each thing you did on each screen. Wow.
We did a lot more in these products, this list is just the 1 thing I think is a big deal for each product.
It took 5 webinars but the word is getting out: the MadCap Webinar Series is in fact tools-neutral. Unless we state the webinar is specifically about our products, the webinar may not even mention our products.
So, if you thought you’d like some Technical Communication related training but thought we were doing some clever bait and switch, we’re not. Go sign up at http://www.madcapsoftware.com/demos/webinars.aspx for the ones coming up or to see the ones you’ve missed.
The next one is Neil Perlin talking about Using your HAT as a Content Management System, March 12 at 9am Pacific.
We’re getting 150 to 300 people signed up for these, so go see what you’ve missed!
Yesterday was my grand daughter’s 4th birthday. She had a tummy thing and spent the day throwing up, so no cupcakes for her. She managed to open the knit sweater and the crochet hat her Nana made and sent.
To see a picture of her looking a little green around the gills but wearing the stuff Nana made, go to here.
Happy Birthday, Tally! May you have a century more, my baby.
Remember that wonderful warm weather I talked about a few weeks ago? I barely do. It’s been cold and wet for the last 10 days.
OK, So Cal cold but my bones are still cold and I’m tired of wet. I know we need the rain, but I’m still tired of it.
And we have about another week of cold and wet to go, at least.
The free tech Comm webinars are going well. We did the one about making the Business Case for Moving to Topic-based Authoring today. It went very well and the response has been very good.
We’re consistently getting 150 to 250 people signed up per webinar and I’m so happy. That tells me there is a need for these and people are really interested. I like that. It’s my project and I’m just really delighted with how it’s going.
One person wrote to me today:
…I was delighted at all the extra tips you gave to help persuade Management if one were presenting a use case. I’m just delighted at the spreadsheet and information that you shared with us all…
All good stuff. To find out more about these webinars, sign up, or view the recorded ones, click here.
We’re going to run a series of 3-5 webinars on CSS. The first few will be product independent, in that they will be about CSS, regardless of the tools you re using. The last one will be an Advanced CSS in Flare or Blaze but you should be able to do this stuff in any CSS-based tool.
We’re thinking of these as a 3-5 hour crash course in CSS. Even if you don’t use our products, I think even the last one or two will be valuable to you because you should be able to hack your current tool in the ways we show you in Flare.
Watch our site for more details. I’m writing the description for the first one in the next day or so.
I hope you are doing something fun on Saturday. Current Husband and I are splurging and going to our favorite romantic resturant for dinner.
It’s where our friends took us for dinner after our wedding. We save this place for special evenings, where we hold hands and remember why we like each other so much. I’m really looking forward to it, even if it’s cold and wet, like it’s supposed to be.
You probably heard that we released a new version of Feedback this week. Feedback is a product that I think every one should be using. You can stop guessing about what’s working and finally start to know.
One of the toughest things in Tech Comm is knowing what information your users are using, how they’re finding it, and what they’re looking for. This really matters because if they want information you created but they aren’t finding it, then it doesn’t exist for them.
With schedules and budgets the way they are, you are also being pushed to the wall to deliver as much as possible in shorter time frames. So, if you’re like me, you make decisions about what you think the users need and what they don’t need. And you may guess wrong.
But what if you could look over your users shoulders? What if you could see what information they are using? How are they finding it? What are they looking for that they aren’t finding? That would make your efforts more focused and would better meet your users needs.
That’s what Feedback does.
You can run reports about where the users are spending time in the online docs, how they got there and what they are searching for. That lets you:
Feedback lets you see what your users are doing and help them better. Ultimately, that’s what Tech Comm professionals do – we’re a helpful people.
Feedback also lets your users rank topics with a 5 star system and you get the information as well, so you can know which topic are really helping and which aren’t.
But you can also get comments back, directly from the topic. These comments can be posted for everyone, moderated by your team before they become visible, or just sent to your team for review.
And, if you’re like me and you spent your career listening to “No one reads the documentation”, wouldn’t it be nice to point to the data from the reports, showing that in fact, people are reading the docs? That would be cool!
We’re running a great deal on Feedback this month. If you want to just try it out to see what you can learn about your docs, we also do a 3 month thing that we host for your docs. No long term obligation, secure environment, all that.
Contact our sales team and ask about the special and the 3-month deal. In 3 months, you can discover a lot about your docs – enough to repay the cost of Feedback, I think.
The webinars (my favorite topic lately!) are going very well. We’re getting 200/250 people signed up for each one. We’ve added 2 more topics. They are:
Controlling costs by controlling language
This tool-independent webinar shows how simplified language options can reduce page count, decrease translation expense, and improve comprehension among non-English audiences. But is it appropriate for you? Find out.
Presenter: Brenda Huettner, P-N Designs, Inc
Apr 23, 2009 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM (Pacific Time)
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/877644241
Users: Who are these people and what do they want?
This tool-independent webinar discusses creating the wrong content for the wrong user is as bad as creating nothing at all. Learn to identify your users and decide how to support them. Reduce costs and schedules by providing the right information.
Presenter: Sharon Burton, MadCap Software
May 14, 2009 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM (Pacific Time)
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/674715509
We’ve not added them to the MadCap website yet but they should appear in the next few days. If you’re interested, sign up.
We’re also recording the webinars so they are available afterwards if the time and date don’t work for you.
OK – I need to get back to work!
It’s 6:45a on a Sunday morning for me. Current Husband is sleeping, the animals are all asleep, and I’m awake. I’ve been up for an hour and a half, because the old dogs wake me up at 5am to go out. And once I’m awake, I’m up.
In a way, I don’t mind being up so early. I’m home and it’s quiet. I have so little time at home to myself, it’s rather nice.
Saturday morning, I taught my first Crochet class at my favorite local yarn store. What does this have to do with Tech Comm you might be asking? Oh, lots.
Friday night, I realized that if I were teaching crochet to people, they needed a thing. So I had to come up with a thing that could be made easily with simple stitches. I could teach the stitches in class and then send them home with the pattern. So I wrote a very simple hat pattern and quickly made a sample to show in class.
In class, I had them start with the simplest stitches and then do those over and over until they were confident. Then we did the next one. And so on, until they had practiced all the stitches they needed to have to make the hat. After 2 hours, I sent them on their way with the pattern.
Teaching this crochet class was Tech Comm in action. I identified the:
My Tech Comm background was very useful in putting this class together! I had a good time teaching it and several people are now able to crochet. I’ll do another class on Tunisian crochet in March sometime.
It’s fun to get slightly outside my usual life and teach new skills to people. I think that when we stop learning, we spiritually die. It’s why I love our field so much – I learn new stuff every day.
Work this week was long and busy. We have a new promotion you may want to look at for the month of February. It’s a screaming deal and should help you get noticed if you’re looking for work or think you might be looking for work soon.
We did the second of the webinars this week as well. These are so successful, I’m working with several people and scheduling June and July now. Keep watching our website for more webinars on various Tech Comm topics.
Between the new promotion for Feb and the webinars, your skills should be so up to date, you can’t help but be successful!
I have a fairly busy day ahead of me. I need to do laundry, meet a former student for lunch, work on the sweater I’m making for my grand daughter, watch Super Bowl and spend time with Current Husband.
Be very good if I could get the oil changed in my car and get it washed, too. That would be a productive day!
Off I go!
For 10 years, Red Herring has been awarding exceptional start up companies who are changing the playing field. MadCap Software has won a Red Herring award! We are in the top 100 companies internationally, which is a huge honor.
Previous winners include Google, Skype, YouTube and others. To see us listed and learn more, go to http://www.herringevents.com/global08/redherring100.html.
As we were talking about how great this is, we realized that this award is really all about our community of users. Four years ago, we had this idea that we thought might change the world a bit. It must have been a good idea, because many people have joined us.
Without people using our products, we’re not even a good idea.
But because people use our products and love our products, we’re successful. We really do owe it all to our user base. So thank you!
The free webinars are going very well. I’m planning some new ones for April and May, so stay tuned for those. They should be posted in late February.
We’re offering tool-neutral free webinars to give back a little to the community. Expect topics that may not have much to do with our products at all but should forward your knowledge of the field.
Because these are recorded, they are more available for all time zones. So now you have no excuse!
As always, feel free to send me topics you’d like to know more about and I’ll see what I can do.
I just received word that I’m been accepted as an STC Associate Fellow! I’m delighted.
I knew I was nominated but working for a vendor might have changed things. Most of what I’ve done in the field has been teach and support tech comm in every place I could, which is part of why MadCap hired me, but… It could have been an issue.
This feels really good. I need a new dress.
I need to record more short demos this week and other stuff, so that’s all the time I’ve got right now.
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