Providing online documentation across “secure” borders
Earlier today Lieve Weymeis (@lilybiri) tweeted about her difficulty in helping someone with an Adobe Captivate query. The problem was not that Lieve couldn’t answer the question. She is one of the world’s experts on this application after all. The problem was with localised internet security. To be more precise, the user in question was based in China. This represented a huge problem for Lieve in delivering her solution as they were unable to access her blog. Several suggestions were offered on Twitter, including using cloud services like Acrobat.com, but at the end of the day if a country decides to block access to key sites or user services there is little that ordinary people like you and me can do.
Chatting about Technical Communication
There have been a few blog posts of late listing the best Twitters chats for those in the Technical Communications industry. For those not in the know, Twitter chats are a mechanism whereby Twitter users can meet at a set time and discuss a relevant issue. However the added value is that all tweets use a hashtag thereby keeping the chat for anyone not able to meet at the advertised time.
Celts, Spaces and Whisk(e)y
Did you know that you can thank the Irish for having spaces between words? Some languages (e.g. German) combine words together to avoid having to add spaces, but they get the idea in the end. Thankfully just about every language in the world now using spaces in some way or another. Just imagine trying to read a block of text without them. I guess the market reach of the Irish race’s space usage has exceeded all their expectations.
Error message: Major rewrite required. Volunteers?
On arrival in the office this morning I went through the usual routine of starting up my PC, opening MS Outlook and checking my email. With offices throughout the world this slightly mundane activity is my way of ensuring my To Do list is up to date with what has happened overnight. This morning I was taken aback by the error message below:
“Why isn’t that documented?”
Just before Christmas I was asked to write a post for the company’s blog. You can read it here. At its heart is how we used web 2.0 methodology to ensure that our users never asked, “Why isn’t that documented?”
