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Forget Best-Selling Audio Books, Listen to Our User Guides for Free!
Did you know you could listen to our user guides read out loud for free? Well, if you have the free Adobe Acrobat Reader or even the full Adobe Acrobat installed on your Windows computer you have the ability to not only read our guides but listen to them...
Meet the Team - Steve S.
Name? Steve S. How long have you been at Blackbaud ? Going on 4 years What technology from the past do you wish would make a comeback? The flux capacitor ... I could always use a little more time in the day! Favorite part of technical communication? Working...
Twitter - Can it Make You a Better Technical Writer?
Copyblogger's Jennifer Blanchard thinks so and I completely agree. According to the post " How Twitter Makes You A Better Writer ", Twitter helps writers in three ways: Twitter forces you to be concise. Twitter forces you to exercise your...
Have you committed a technical writing sin?
I’ve been re-reading some old posts in the field, and after reading Amy Hoy's Slash7 post on " How Tech Writing Sucks: The Five Sins ," I started thinking… is it really possible not to commit any one of the five sins? The Five Sins - Losing...
How do you explain technical writing to a kid?
The short answer is… you don’t! Last Friday, I had the distinct privilege to be part of a special field trip for kids from Meeting Street Academy (See Rachel’s blog post for more background on the special event). In short summary, I was to explain to...
How can we produce effective yet efficient user assistance content?
One of my esteemed co-workers shared this awesome article with me last week and now I want to share it with other writers of user assistance content in the field. If you haven’t read it yet, Mike Hughes’ article Straight Talk: Surviving Tough Times as...
Developing Trust in Help Content
One topic I am reading about, that I missed the discussion on over holiday break, is all this talk about whether people trust blogs on corporate websites. While I really don’t know where to put my two cents in about trust and corporate blogs (because...
User-Generated Help: Future of Documentation?
Of late, I’ve been intrigued by something YouTube is doing. They are requesting user-submitted documentation in the form of videos. Well the video part makes sense, right? However, it’s interesting they are reaching out to the audience to supplement their...
Have a Helpful Idea?
Your suggestions are heard. Yes, I know it can be hard to believe sometimes but some people (finger pointing at me and the rest of Blackbaud) love to listen. Listening is fun because you don’t have to pretend to know everything. You can let others share...
Journey from Structred Frame to SharePoint Server Wiki
The journey from last week to this week already feels a decade long as I’ve encountered many trials and errors in converting internal team documentation authored in Structured FrameMaker into a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 friendly format. In other...
What Do Users Need?
A simple question. What do users need? My mind starts thinking about it and I realize there are just too many answers to mentally fathom. Recently, someone on my team shared a great link to discussion results from a recent CIDM conference. http://www...
Vintage Documentation
Wired magazine published a great photo essay on classic instruction manuals. It’s funny and pretty cool to see how far we’ve come as a field. Although my team is in agreement, that poor guy from Apple - what was he thinking selling his share of Apple...
Documentation Survey 3rd Quarter Results
On October 9th, Justin announced our third quarter documentation survey winner. I thought it might be nice to discuss some of our results from the survey with our blog readers. A link to our survey appears on the Blackbaud User Guides pages (accessed...
By Popular Demand - The Raiser's Edge 7 for Beginners
We often get great feedback about our documentation from our users. Sometimes, it's a friendly head's up of a typo that made its way out into the world (d'oh!). My favorites, though, are when I get to help fulfill a user’s request or search...
Google's Chrome Comic Book Documentation
The buzz in the online world the past few weeks is about Google's new Internet browser Chrome . In the Technical Communication world, the buzz is around Google's choice to create a help book to explain Chrome. Why the buzz? Well it was done in...
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