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Subject:TechWhirl Recap for the Week of Halloween From:INKtopia Admin <admin -at- inktopia -dot- net> To:Techwr-l <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 4 Nov 2011 09:35:22 -0400
This week’s update is supported by Platinum sponsor Madcap & their Ultimate
Communications Suite, MadPak | http://goo.gl/eO3ls
It’s been a scary, scary week here at TechWhirl. It started with our first
(but soon-to-be annual) TechWhirl Halloween Playhouse, the soft launch of
our new jobs website, TechCommJobs.Com <http://techcommjobs.com/>, and
followed by frantic organization \ coordination of our upcoming trip to the
LavaCon Conference <http://lavacon.org/>.
How in the world can we finish it all when the holiday season, now often
called the “silly season” in the UK, is staring us in the face with those
giant Great Pumpkin eyes?
Wow, lucky transition… that happens to be our theme for November—Managing
Projects during the Holidays. So far our weekly poll shows that two out of
every three people feel they have things under control and won’t be eating
holiday (insert your ceremonial food here) while staring at a requirements
document.
Managing projects to a successful completion is tough even when everyone
isn’t dreaming of sugarplums and planning strategic sick days, but the
holidays—especially if you have a hard deadline—are darn tough. This month
we’ll be providing some tips and tricks plus some guidance on the subject
and listening to you to get your ideas. How do you do it? (add it to the
comments and we’ll summarize them in a post.)
Scary all Year Long
Sniff. Put away the chain saws. Sniff. Put away the all black attire and
hockey masks. It’s over. All over. Sigh.
No more screams or puddlings or anything. Now it’s *all turkeys and that
big guy who breaks into houses*, it’s so depressing. But wait! Most of us
work in corporate world and that’s scary all year long. We and you know
that those Tech Writer Horror
Stories<http://techwhirl.com/topics/fiction/tech-writer-horror-stories/>weren’t
just scary, they were also true; so why do we have to put away
everything just yet?
What’s next? We’d like letters from you to Santa (or the Great Pumpkin, or
…) in a feature we’re calling *Dear Santa—All I want for Christmas and Next
Year is ___. *There’s plenty of time for thought pieces on Integrated
Technical Communications (http://goo.gl/lDPMp) later, for this feature any
wish is fine.
The Road to LavaCon
To be blunt, we’ve never tried to cover an event like real life journalists
so we’re spending a lot of time thinking about what we want to cover and
how we’re going to cover it. Just because we are an online trade magazine
for technical communicators doesn’t mean we want to do a full documentation
of it. We want to present interesting things that help ping your thoughts
and interests.
The theme is* Developing Content for a Global Audience, *and we’re looking
to cover some of the big events live, others by quick summaries, and still
others by a quick Twitter post. Once it’s all done we’ll produce several
feature articles exploring some of the subthemes that appear during the
event.
What should we cover? What should we avoid? Add ‘em to the comments and
we’ll do our best.
Social Media and the Chance to Follow TechWhirl:
Will you be our Friend? Please, you know you want to click | http://goo.gl/tDrW7
Want all this TechWhirl goodness a few characters @ a time | http://goo.gl/itjDg
Typing TechWhirl.Com too much for you? Try RSS | http://goo.gl/msLzu
What You’re Talking About
A quick *What you talkin’ ‘bout* to our Tech Writers and their discussions
in our email discussion group <http://goo.gl/YUrbb>:
- Becca Price referenced “Penguins?” when asking for advice about
whether to include explanatory information on CSS on XHTML in a document
describing how to create ebooks without them. Good solid advice on
understanding the audience, and where the explanatory information might be
included without disrupting the flow of the document.
- Roberta Hennessey is seeking out “Career/Skill Advice” as she
considers getting training in usability. Whirlers responded with thoughts
about adding localization, accessibility and various programming
languages. Going with what interests you and matching that with current
desired skills seems to be the consensus of the advice.
- Guess what, lots more on the various incarnations of STC
Certifications debates. Big surprise, right?
We want to send a very special “thank you” to our sponsors for their
support. Without them our Ghost sheet would have too many holes and we’d
only get a lousy stone when trick-or-treating.
> What is this new jobs site in which you speak? It wouldn’t be a soft
launch if we promoted it a lot, not yet anyway.
--
TechWhirl.com
Online Magazine and Discussions for Today's Tech Writer
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Facebook: facebook.com/techwriterlist
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