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 as well. It's a little known feature that...

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 with multiple products, learning about new...

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 vocabulary. Twitter forces you to improve your editing...

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 the reader Making the reader feel stupid Failing...

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 four and five year olds what I do for a living. Hmmm...

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 a User Assistance Writer is a great read and quite...

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 I mostly write this blog just to interact with our...

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 official documentation. Is it fair to put the...

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 their unique experiences, thoughts, and visions...

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 words, complex framemaker to basic html. I’m not...