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Sarah Maddox Female Sydney, Australia: eakjx71bf3q2; Share

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Style manual for authors, editors and printers (John Wiley & Sons Australia)

Started Mar 23

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My blog

Content re-use on a wiki

You’re writing a page on a wiki and you realise that some words you wrote just the other day would make sense here too. But where oh where are they? Or you want to include a picture, such as a logo, that’s used on other pages all over the show. Of course, you could just [...]

A smooth ride through the text

Part of our job as technical writers is to give our readers a smooth ride through the text. And it’s not a small part of the job either. It’s important, even if it means we spend a fair bit of time correcting other people’s writing. Or does that just turn us into glorified copy editors [...]

Sugar on my Vista laptop

Today I installed QEMU emulator and managed to get the OLPC XO’s Sugar user interface running on my Windows Vista laptop. Sugar is based on Fedora with a custom GUI shell. Here’s Sugar over Vista: Sugar offering to search for more “activities” i.e. XO applications: It’s been an interesting experience There were a couple of hiccups. As [...]

Arthur C Clarke and Web 2.0

I’ve just finished re-reading The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C Clarke, published in 1979. A lot of people know him as SF-writer extraordinaire. Some would recognise his visionary engineering insights too. We might even acknowledge him as a pretty reasonable technical writer But did you know he was into Web 2.0 as well? In [...]

OLPC Australia’s first techfest

Yesterday I attended the first techfest organised by OLPC Australia. It was a full day of talks, demonstrations and workshops aimed principally at people who might want to get involved on the technical side. I’ve come away with much more knowledge of the OLPC project itself as well as the hardware and software involved on [...]

AODC - in conclusion

Last week I attended the Australasian Online Documentation and Content Conference (AODC) on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. I’ve posted a number of detailed reports on the sessions I attended. This post is a summary and a “thank you” to the organisers. A big thank you to Penny Bradley, Tony Self and HyperWrite — you [...]

My Prickly Paperbark tree

This is a special edition of the ffeathers blog, to report the spectacular growth of my Prickly Paperbark tree since I last blogged about it approximately a month ago. On 13 April, the tree was 172 cm. Today it’s 188 cm — grown 16 cm in five weeks! It’s now over 6 foot and taller than [...]

AODC - error messages

This week I attended the Australasian Online Documentation and Content Conference (AODC) on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. The last session was entitled “The World’s Word Error Messages, or How to Scare End Users” presented by Frank “Choco” Munday. Choco is a prolific and experienced technical writer, author and adventurer, and a member of the [...]

AODC - guided help

This week I attended the Australasian Online Documentation and Content Conference (AODC) on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. In one of Friday’s sessions, Matthew Ellison explained the concept of “guided help” and showed us some fascinating examples. His session was entitled “Guided Help: A Revolution for Software Help and Support?” Matthew is a user-assistance professional [...]

AODC - separating content, structure, format and behaviour

This week I’m attending the Australasian Online Documentation and Content Conference (AODC) on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. With his inimitable flair and style, Dave Gash presented a session this morning entitled “The Search for the UA Grail: True Separation of Content, Structure, Format and Behaviour”. Dave is the owner of HyperTrain dot Com, specialising [...]

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Profile

Job Title:: Technical Writer

Company Name:: Atlassian

About Me:: Technical writer and blogger. Thinks documentation is almost as much fun as rollerblading and snorkelling. But chocolate beats them all.

Website:: http://ffeathers.wordpress.com

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At 8:15am on April 14th, 2008, Brian Winter said…: Hi Sarah! Thanks very much for your excellent response about using a wiki for spec reviews. I'm in LinkedIn so I checked out your profile there. "Producing docs that rock"... thanks, I'm sure I will steal that in the future. Blue skies...

- Brian

At 5:48am on March 24th, 2008, David Farbey said…: Thanks for your comment on the "working with Agile" discussion. I have been looking at your blog and see you are quite the expert in "XTW"!!

David

At 6:21am on March 23rd, 2008, Scott Abel said…: Welcome to The Content Wrangler Community! I'm glad to see you joined us and hope you find this community a great place to locate and share information among peers. As the network grows, so too will the services offered. So, keep an eye out for new ways to interact with each other. And, if you need help, just ask. We'll do our best to assist.

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