Idiotprogrammer: Texas Literary Blog

Category: Tech Writing

  • Fun with MS Word Wildcards

    How to use Wildcards and Regular Expressions in MS Word to solve messy OCR conversions. By TX litblogger Robert Nagle

  • A friendly exchange between an technical author and reviewer

    This fun thing is something I published in 2000 on my old site — and has since become dead. A mixed review of a famous book on programming prompts a reply from the author and a friendly discussion about book reviewing My Original Review (August 2000) about the book Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl…

  • Tutorial: How to control the crap which appears on your Facebook wall

    Screencapture courtesy of the wonderful SnagIt software. That said, I have to admit that I am not telling half the story here. First, you can use the dropdown menu to fine-tune who can see these wall posts. You can even create customized groups that can’t view your wall. Facebook is adept at hiding  options and…

  • Something I am really proud of!

    I’ve been writing a technical book on Plone and uncovering all sorts of user issues and bugs. I’m particularly proud of finding this one: it’s something that software developers would never notice – and yet would bug the living crap out of anybody creating content. One little known fact about technical writing is that you…

  • Google Docs is ….useless?

    I just discovered something NASTY: the HTML export on Google docs is totally useless. BR tags everywhere instead of P tags. What was google/writerly thinking? Over the last year or two I have been keeping more and more of my personal documents and record keeping  on Google Docs, mainly for safety reasons. Recently I wrote…

  • Docbook, Pandoc, Rants and Some Decent Free Fonts

    I’m working on a user manual and am in the process of discovering several tools to do the job. Here’s RSTA,  an online restructured text editor which lets you output into HTML and PDF. This is mainly of interest to people in the plone and python world. Python programmer extraordinaire Mark Pilgrim explains why he…

  • Job Interview Test

    Yesterday I interviewed for a technical writer job. Three people interviewed me,  and overall it went well. At the end, they asked me to take a short written test. This was a little unusual, but it went fine. They handed me a written set of instructions and left me alone with a laptop. On the…

  • Book Review: Practical Plone 3

    With the proliferation of content management system (CMS) software, a need has arisen for good manuals. When a CMS starts out, user forums are usually the main place for help;  then someone will start a wiki, and a few people will write tutorials on their blogs. But if the user base for a CMS grows…

  • Ken Circeo: Technical Writers can be interesting (sometimes)

    I was reading a small piece from a Microsoft person about how he came to be a technical writer when I decided to plow through his archives. The stuff I found just cracked me up. Technical Writer (and ex-Microsoft worker)  Ken Circeo on meeting Bill Gates: At first, I thought it might be a Gates…

  • Lots of Things to Blog About..and No time!

    I’ve been behind on blogging, but actually have a lot to blog about.  Here’s a longer-than-usual post to satisfy your daily Nagle fix. This may be the first year that the North Pole will be ice-free reports CNN’s Alan Duke. Will someone please explain to me why William Kristol is allowed to write for the…

  • Where is my email?

    I started at a new technical writing gig two weeks ago and I recently discovered 2 things about Microsoft products (specifically Office 2007). In fact, chances are that I will buy a copy fairly soon. It only costs $115. MS Word is really incredible. A lot of its improvements have to do with user interface…

  • Why Users Don’t Read Documentation: Technical Writing Secrets

    Peter Morville’s subject of findability comes up all the time in looking for information on the web. Yesterday I was seeking a driver for an old scanner. Should be easy. I had a serial number but not the model number. Unfortunately, the website contained no information about how to determine the model number. To access…

  • Presentation (August 25): Optimizing for Reading: The Art and Science of Presenting Content

    This Saturday I’ll be giving a presentation with Gerry Manacsa at Barcamp Houston. (See my post-presentation wrapup here) Subject Optimize for Reading: the art (and science) of presenting content Date: August 25, 2007. Probably 10:00 AM. (There is no set schedule, but we’ll probably be presenting before noon). Location: Houston Technology Center Cost: Free! (as…

  • Balancing Online Resumes with Online Identities

    (I was interviewed recently for a social science study about online resumes and identities. My answers are listed below). 1. In your response to the survey questionnaire, you wrote that you have found your linkedin page to be more useful than an independent resume / business site, though you have plans to develop an independent…

  • Em spaces vs. En spaces revisited

    I’ve always considered myself a sloppy writer (case in point: this weblog!). I haven’t really worried about stylistic/punctuation/grammatical consistency until near the end of a job. Then I go check everything once (maybe a global search and replace), and hopefully solve the problems. However, I just realized that in some of my more important projects,…

  • The Joy (and Boredom) of Technical Writing

    Ken Circero on the banality of techical writing: The ability to deliver software manuals (or, “docs”) on the Web has taken the technical writing world by storm. Tech writers the world over are singing its praises. The way they carry on, you’d have thought someone had discovered a way to flash the docs in the…