Trends | I Heart Technical Writing, Tips, Tools and Templates for Technical Writers

Entries Tagged as 'trends'

How To Get More Traffic To Your Technical Writing Blog

March 17th, 2010 · View Comments · Technical Writing

To quote Van Halen, ‘everybody wants some.’ And what you want is traffic. Why write a blog if no-one visits, right? I have 17 technical writers’ blogs in my Google Reader & RSS feeds. Most are fine but… if they used some of the following tactics, they’d get more traffic, comments, money and Nobel prizes. [...]

Technical Writing News – FrameMaker Shortcuts, Life-Saving Checklists & Twitter for Professional Development

January 28th, 2010 · View Comments · Adobe FrameMaker, Career, Content Management, Dita, Doc 2 Help, News, Snagit, Technical Writers, Technical Writing, Twitter, Visio

Why are most technical writing blog written by men? Do you think it’s true? This week’s newsletter also has updates on Technical Authoring tools such as ComponentOne’s Editable Data Portals for SharePoint, Morae 3.2 (Techsmith’s best kept secret), and the beta version Microsoft Visio 2010. Learn how to fix Adobe Distiller bugs with Technical [...]

What Macaulay Culkin Can Teach You About Tech Authoring & Jumping Sharks

January 24th, 2010 · Comments Off · Adobe FrameMaker, Dita

Larry says that last week another technical writer asserted that DITA has “jumped the shark.” “It’s not a new idea. I’ve heard other people say that DITA has already seen its best days, that it’s struggling to remain relevant in a world that’s passed it by. I was amused, I admit, because it was the first time I’d seen DITA compared to a TV show.”

7 Ways for Technical Writers to Re-invent Themselves & Demonstrate their Value

January 9th, 2010 · View Comments · Career, Facebook, Linkedin

You’ve just being fired. The Technical Writing dept is closed. What do you do? This is a fact of life for many people today. Indeed, there is now a real fear that US technical writers will continue to lose their jobs to offshore companies, e.g. India & Poland. And it’s true; it’s the shape of things to come, I’m afraid. But rather than moan about it, let’s look at what you can do to re-invent yourself and find new, lucrative opportunities.

Using Google Reader to share data, trends, and visual info

October 9th, 2009 · Comments Off · Facebook, Google

I’ve started a small experiment. I use RSS to monitor blogs, gather data, and share information. What I’ve now started to do is share ‘the best of the web’ using Google Reader. This lets you track web feeds and share those you think other readers would be interested in.

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Tags: data·Google Reader·trends·visual info

How to Get Out of Technical Writing and into Better Paid Jobs

October 5th, 2009 · View Comments · Career, India, STC

Many IT professionals, technical writers included, have seen their salaries frozen or reduced over the past 18 months. Contractors are suffering the same fate as short-term projects dry up. However, several of my colleagues have managed to move out of technical writing and into other, better paid lines of work. Here’s a roundup.

XML has won! All major office suites now save their documents in zipped XML by default

June 11th, 2009 · Comments Off · Technical Writing

For Microsoft®, the nightmare of a younger, nimbler competitor overtaking them is also coming true. The company was so distracted by Sun and Netscape that it failed to notice Google sneaking up on Office and Windows. GMail, Google Docs, and similar applications from a variety of sources are rapidly rendering the underlying operating system irrelevant.

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Tags: Dita·ibm·Jobs·Technical Writing·trends·wikipedia·XML