I’d Rather Be Writing – Tom Johnson

If you have a way of tagging or marking the good content you read online — such as adding it to a specific category on your blog, bookmarking it through Delicious, or putting the link on some other online site — send me the RSS feed for it, and I’ll add it to the Yahoo Pipes aggregated feed that I have going with Writer River.

Here’s what the Yahoo Pipes feed looks like at the moment.

Writer River Yahoo Pipes feed

It’s simple compared to other Yahoo Pipes feeds. Basically the pipe takes RSS feeds from as many sources as I add here, sorts the posts by the date published, filters out any duplicate titles, and then merges all the information into one RSS feed. Writer River then displays this RSS feed on its home page. When you subscribe to the Writer River RSS feed (or when you subscribe to Writer River’s email delivery or Twitter updates), you’re also subscribing to this same Yahoo Pipes feed.

I’m convinced that human-assisted aggregation and filtering, with the help of such tools as Yahoo Pipes, is the trend for managing the deluge of information online. Since everyone is an author, publishing on separate sites, RSS is the only way to keep up. And people are publishing like mad, pushing out about a million posts a day. Read the rest of this entry »

With all the talk about latest trends and avoiding extinction as communicators, and integrating web 2.0 and wikis, blogs, podcasts, and other interactive social media into help, it’s a good time to look at how Google — practically the leader of the web — does help.

Last week Google released Google Voice, a service that allows you to integrate all your phones into one number and includes a host of features, including voice mail, recording, conference calling, and other services.

To help users get started, Google Voice has a list of 20 short videos. Only the overview video contains animation. It’s certainly the video they’ve put the most work into, and it also functions as marketing collateral.

The other videos are fairly simple, with short looping background music, professional voice talent, and a read script. The defining quality is that each video is short, some as short as 25 seconds. Read the rest of this entry »

Beginning writers trying to break into the field of technical writing face a paradox: almost all jobs require experience, but they can’t get experience without first having a job.

In the past, I’ve recommended that beginning writers create documentation for any open-source project they can find, such as WordPress, Audacity, or projects on SourceForge.net. However, our organization now has about ten open source projects that would provide an ideal opportunity for entry-level writers to gain real experience in technical writing. These projects are located at https://tech.lds.org/wiki. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m trying something a little new on my blog. Previously, every time I read a cool post, I submitted the link to Writer River. The problem with that, however, is that posting to another site isn’t such a smart search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Using the Writer River method, people who follow trackbacks don’t follow them back to my site (idratherbewriting.com), but rather go to another site (writerriver.com).

Additionally, it’s more beneficial for me to link to others from my idratherbewriting.com site, because it has a higher authority than writerriver.com. Links from higher authority sites are more beneficial in transferring search engine visibility than links from lower authority sites. For example, a link from NYTimes.com will push you to the top of Google results while a link from Sam’s vacation blog probably won’t have much influence.

So here’s what I did to better search engine optimize my site. I created a new section on my site called What I’m Reading. The page shows all the posts I’m reading (which I want to share), with short commentaries or summaries about the content. This way I keep the keywords and links on my site. I’m hoping that this strategy will create more pull back to my own site and will increase the rank of those I link to, more so than links from Writer River. Read the rest of this entry »

With a title like crunching and burning, it may sound like I’m writing about a painful illness, such as having leprosy with third degree burns and walking on sharp gravel. But actually this post is about the terms some companies use to try to make their applications look super-cool. If you’re a web 2.0 company trying to establish your product as the bomb, all the rage, critical to being hip, etc. you can’t use generic names and emotionless adjectives. You want to conjure up some inner appeal to coolness.

So when you upload images into WordPress, you see a progress bar that says “Crunching.” Crunching is sexy. Crunching sounds exciting. Crunching makes you feel like you’re on the edge of some new functionality that is so revolutionary, no other term can quite describe it. But really, all crunching means is resizing. When you upload images in WordPress, the image editor resizes the original image into three separate images: thumbnail, medium, and large.

"Crunching" is really just resizing

The problem with using the term “crunching” rather than “resizing” is that, although it’s cool, most users don’t actually realize what’s going on. They don’t realize that they can set the dimensions that the image is being resized to. They don’t realize this because crunching is vague. Crunching is eating grape nuts, or stepping on cheerios, or feeding tickets into Chuck-E-Cheese counting machines. Crunching rarely means resizing. The tradeoff for cool interface terms is confusion. Read the rest of this entry »

GUI Mags

Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As)
Length: 6 min.

GuiMags was a vendor booth at the STC Summit that caught my attention. I’m often running into people who want me to create WordPress templates to match their websites. Creating these templates is somewhat tedious for me, and it can take 1-2 days of work and haggling with CSS to get it to look right. These GuiMags guys gave me a glimpse at a simpler model.

GuiMags (graphical user interface magnets) provides a quick way to prototype software interfaces and websites without having to step into code. You can work with a customer to get the basic features and design using simple magnets on a grid board, making changes immediately in meetings with customers. After you settle on a design, you can then outsource the labor to international developers to create the templates cheaply. You don’t even have to touch a computer to create prototypes.

To learn more about the GuiMags, see GuiMags.com.

Picture of me and Efraim Meulenberg of GuiMags

Have you ever tried to adjust your office chair but couldn’t remember how to do it? Do you ever look at all the little levers under your seat and wonder how they work with the myriad muscles in your back? Don’t you wish you could just pull a quick reference guide … out of the arm of your chair? Read the rest of this entry »

Here I am getting the kids breakfast

Many of you may know I was recently featured in an AP article calling attention to the deadbeat role that many husbands and fathers play in keeping up the house and helping with the kids.

Actually, although I was featured, it was more of an example of the positive possibilities about the role husbands and fathers could play, not the negative.

Here are a few newspapers I was featured in:

• The Northwestern
• Alabama (al.com)
• The Island Packet
• Tennessean
• Courier Post Online
• Independent Tribune
• Oregon Live
• AOL.com
• Courier Journal

That’s just the first page of Google. You can see more if you like.

Anyway, the number of newspapers is not really the point. The AP article was syndicated. Since then, I’ve received at least a dozen inquiries from people who opened their newspaper and happened to see photos of me helping my children get ready for church. Read the rest of this entry »

The DITA-to-WordPress importer tool allows you to import the XHTML output from the DITA Open Toolkit as pages into WordPress. This  importer (created by Mike Little, a brilliant developer who had a hand in creating WordPress itself) is available for download here, along with a sample XHTML output.

The DITA-to-WordPress tool fills a major gap with the existing DITA outputs. Currently, the DITA Open Toolkit doesn’t have a webhelp output. The XHTML output provides an index of files in a left pane with the topics in the right, but it is so plain and unattractive that I can’t imagine anyone actually using it.

With the DITA-to-WordPress importer, you can use WordPress as your online help format. This approach provides unique advantages over other help tools on the market.  Basically, WordPress taps into all the juicy features of Web 2.0 and gives you them for free. Read the rest of this entry »

The STC Intercom published an article I wrote about Writer River called “Caught in the Current of Writer River: Building and Participating in Community-Driven Websites.” If you’re a member of the STC and you have access to the Intercom, check your latest copy (January 2009) or log in to stc.org and download the article here (PDF).

If you don’t have access, you can read the original post I wrote, which is nearly the same article but without the awesome graphic that the Intercom designers added.

My Writer River article in STC's Intercom magazine