You may know that I’m a technical writer by profession. I wrote a brief account of my “Adventures in Publishing: Finding a Gig as a Computer-Book Author” for the webzine associated with the venerable Technical Writing mailing list (TechWr-L). You may find it interesting.
Getting ready to pack up the laptop and head west. I’m spending the next few days in Sacramento, California, at the annual Technical Communication Summit. This three-day conference sponsored by the Society for Technical Communication is packed full of sessions that I hope will make me a better writer.
Among the topics I’ll be keen to track are trends toward collaborative user assistance and social media in tech comm, and how to provide help on mobile platforms. I’m also going to a session on making better presentations. I’m also excited to hear our keynote address from Tim O’Reilly. You can see me gush a little about that over at Notes from the Metaverse.
Watch my Twitter feed (@workingwriter) and the hashtag #stc11 for quick reports. With some good fortune, I’ll blog at the end of each day in the Technical Communication category.
Had a great time talking about What’s New in WordPress 3.1 at the Web414 “Ultimate WordPress Showdown” Thursday. It wasn’t as pugnacious as it sounds, though. Scott Offord from OrionWeb demonstrated listing child pages, custom fields for arrays, and a couple SEO-oriented plugins (slides here). Jeramey Jannene made a simple plugin before our very eyes.
When my turn came, I looked really stupid, as I couldn’t get the laptop and projector to play nice with each other (Thanks, Ashe!). Once I recovered from that, it went pretty well. At some point, I think there will be video at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/web414-meetings-channel.
My publisher may not entirely approve, but I promised to offer links to posts I found really helpful in preparing my talk. It’s just coincidence that they both have books about WordPress:
One more thing: There was a positive response in the meeting to my proposal for a WordCamp in Milwaukee in 2011. I’ll be submitting a proposal to WordCampCentral this week. Watch this space for updates.
