Shoap Technical ServicesThe I’d Rather Be Writing techcom blog posts 10 Alternative Tests for Technical Writing Job Candidates. Not all of the ideas apply to our situation at STS, as we are all technical writers here, we don’t really have in-house documentation, and tend to recruit more entry-level folks who we can mold to our ways before they are corrupted by outside influences. However, there were some interesting suggestions.
The client that I currently work for requires all employees and contractors to be available on a proprietary instant messaging system at all times during working hours.
eLearning Weekly has a love/hate relationship with Captivate. It’s fun to read about it, especially since they point out workarounds that might save me some time.
Mobilemind also has some tips on how to avoid breaking SCORM when using Captivate.
Ah… nothing is as beautiful as the majestic Captivate bug in its natural habitat!
Here’s a few other things I’ve learned about this wonderful tool (version 2 in particular):
Stay tuned… I work with this beast on an almost daily basis so I’m sure there will be more tips coming!
[Picture of leaf-cutters by mariandy_gizfel.]
My current Shoap Technical Services assignment requires me to work with Captivate extensively. We use the tool to create walk-throughs of new systems and software, as well as web-based training packages that students can study independently, and at their own pace.
I’ve covered in the past some of Flare’s wonky behavior when it comes it to white space. I found another fun trick involving white space while searching in Flare 2.5 yesterday.
Someone recently posted an interesting question and answer over at TechWR-L that I wanted to touch on briefly as it is a topic on my (obviously) neglected list of things to blog about. The question was about how much jargon is okay to use in documentation. The answer posted in a comment was:
You only have too much jargon if the jargon interferes with the ability of the audience to understand what you’re trying to communicate. If the audience speaks that jargon on a daily basis, you’re doing them a disservice by trying to eliminate their jargon.
After years of slander and ridicule, passive voice has been found to be useful by Jakob Nielsen’s eye-tracker research. Mr. Nielsen’s article, titled Passive Voice Redeemed for Web Headings, makes an excellent case for the use of passive voice as a sneaky way of “front-loading” keywords in headings for blog posts, articles, or other web content. It cites recent eye-tracker research as proof that Internet users tend to focus only on the first few words of a headline.
Why is it that when people get stuck trying to figure out a piece of technology, they invariably pick up the phone and call a help desk rather than open a manual or, if it’s available, click on the help button? Certainly, it would be quicker to find the answer than wait for the “next representative to become available.” The answer, of course, is obvious, as anyone who has tried to read a technical manual can tell you: Either the answer isn’t readily available (can’t find it) or doesn’t make sense (can’t figure out what’s being said when they do find it).
It’s link round-up time once again! Here’s what I found on the Interweb this week:
That’s all for now. TGIF!
I recently learned about the FAT32 file size limit and thought I’d share.
One of our clients recently purchased a Western Digital External Hard Drive to use as backup storage and a way to pass large files around quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, we received write errors on the drive when we tried to copy several items onto it. The reason we were getting these errors was because the hard drive was formatted as a FAT32 file system. This was nice, because FAT32 is a pretty simple file system that both Windows, Macs, and other Unix Operating Systems can read. However, you cannot copy a file larger than 4 GiB minus 1 Byte (232?1 bytes) into a FAT32 file system. Having multiple raw video files on the machine, well over 4 gigs each, this posed a problem.
My solution was to partition the hard drive into one 32 GiB FAT32 file system and the rest of the drive into NTFS. This allows me to put files of any size onto the NTFS partition and still maintain some of the flexibility of the FAT32 partition on other OS’s. You could also create a Mac partition with a Mac file system, should you desire.
Hope this helps answer someone’s question.