Which blogging software?

Among the free blogging sites, I recommend WordPress over Blogger.

Blogger gives you very simple capabilities: blog, post, tag, and archive posts and enable and manage comments. If you want something more complicated, you must go into your template and edit the code. There are no categories, so things tend to get chaotic. And if you customize your blog or change templates, all your improvements disappear.

Wordpress has more features that are useful for a larger blog. You don't have to use them until you need them but they are there. You can not only set tags but specify categories. You can set up a rotating blogroll instead of hand-coding it. There are simply a lot more options, which give you more flexibility.

Here's my test blog, created during a few minutes of the Blogging Skills session at the Science Blogging Conference.

ROM finds skeleton in its closet

You have to admit this is funny - and a real warning about the loss of "folklore" information in organizations. The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto has a new display hall for its dinosaur fossils. The new curator of dinos, who just started this year, was told that he could go out and get a big one. While researching in the U.S.,he found a reference to a really big skeleton that the ROM already had -- but nobody back home knew about it.

The museum traded for a large dinosaur skeleton thirty years ago - but there was no room to put it up. Over the years, the bones were stored separately and everyone forgot about it -- except for the old curator, but he retired and eventually died. I think that there's a mixture of pleasure and embarrassment for the museum in finding that they have a large Barosaurus specimen that is more complete than most. It is being lovingly assembled, the missing parts duplicated if left-right or copied from other specimens, and will be mounted at the museum by December 15 It's particularly nice since the museum has a tyrannosauroid, has a duckbilled dinosaur, and has a stegosaurus - but no diplodocoid until now. That they knew of.

The picture of Barosaurus is from Wikipedia commons.

How to Succeed in the Transition to Content Management

Tonight the Toronto STC are holding their monthly meeting at North York Centre. Steve Manning will be on hand to tell us how to convert a company's technical documentation from ad-hoc content to managed content. Content includes writings, logos, diagrams, marketing materials, procedures, and the information that makes a company more than just a collection of people at desks. Content management implies having consistent, controlled content that has been vetted for accuracy, divided into manageable chunks, and analyzed for re-use. Here's the blurb:

At our last meeting Michael Priestly told you what you can do with Darwin Information Typing Architecture. This month Steve Manning of The Rockley Group will show you what people have already done.

At The Rockley Group, Steve Manning participates in implementing DITA for a number of clients. His clients range from government departments to hardware & software companies. Some companies had content management systems, some did not. Some used DITA "out of the box", others created specializations.

For this meeting, Steve will talk about these projects and what these companies experienced: unexpected issues, positive surprises, technology challenges, writer responses, and the measurement of success.

Steve Manning

• is a Principal with The Rockley Group who has over 19 years of experience in documentation
• is a skilled developer of online documentation in many formats
• uses key online tools to create single-source production methodologies
• has wide experience in project management and has managed a number of multiple-media, single-source projects
• teaches "Enterprise Content Management" at the University of Toronto
• s a frequent speaker at conferences about XML, DITA and Content Management
• is a member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee.

With Ann Rockley and Pamela Kostur, Steve is also a co-author of Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy.

LavaCon and PMI GNO 2007 Professional Development Summit

I'm going to New Orleans! Any science bloggers there? On Saturday, I'm taking the option of helping the community, at a Habitat for Humanity site or elsewhere.

LavaCon® is partnering with the Project Management Institute® Greater New Orleans Chapter to co-host a Professional Development Summit in New Orleans, October 27–30, 2007.

The fifth annual LavaCon will present proven best practices in the fields of technical communication and technical communication management, including strategies for choosing technology platforms, migrating to XML and content management, reducing training and translation costs, and more.

The www.lavacon.org site is currently down, proving that even project managers have real life happen to them. If you're interested, run a search on the Web site and then look at cached pages, or call 1-866-302-5774, ext 201.

Update: the link is working again.

Web Content conference, June 2007

The Web Content 2007 conference will be held in Chicago, Illinois, on June 18 and 19. The keynote speaker is Ann Rockley, the well-known online content guru and author. There are three sets of concurrently scheduled sessions: Content Design & Access, Content Development & Management, and Tools & Technologies. The conference is aimed at professionals who create, organize, and maintain Web content.

Usability for Content Management Systems

James Robertson of Step Two Designs has just published a new article titled "Eleven usability principles for CMS products":

* minimise the number of options
* be robust and error-proof
* provide task-based interfaces
* hide implementation details
* meet core usability guidelines
* match authors' mental models
* support both frequent and infrequent users
* provide efficient user interfaces
* provide help and instructions
* minimise training required
* support self-sufficiency

SDL acquires Tridion

SDL, mainly a translation company with some content management, and Tridion, a Content Management company, have agreed that SDL will buy Tridion for 69 million Euros, subject to the approval of SDL's shareholders. Tridion's expertise in XML-based content management should actually fit nicely into keeping the translated bits organized. SDL supplies the translation workflow and expertise.

Flickr photos in Google maps

The Science Library Pad has an article about connecting your own photos in Flickr to Google maps, by using GeoRSS.

MadCap Flare succeeds RoboHelp

At the STC Toronto meeting of March 13, we were fortunate to have Mike Hamilton of MadCap describing the history of MadCap Flare development.

Mike Hamilton is the Vice President of Product Management at MadCap Software where he is working on the next generation authoring tool, Flare. Before joining MadCap Software, he was the Product Manager for the RoboHelp product line since the days of Blue Sky Software, eHelp, and Macromedia. His background is in technical communication and he cares about quality.

After Macromedia bought Blue Sky Software and its flagship product, Robohelp, support for the product gradually decreased. One of the genius programmers who was laid off in the first wave started to work on a new product, written in a new language. After the rest of the team were laid off, they decided to start over and they found their wandering genius and his new product, which eventually became Flare. Flare is written in C# and stores everything in XML so that no database is needed.

He described the help authoring and documentation tool from MadCap Software called Flare. Flare is a new single-sourcing, authoring tool that empowers technical writers, help content authors, and other documentation professionals to compose content in XML format without requiring any knowledge of the XML language or XML. It is extremely flexible and has overcome some of RoboHelp's old weaknesses.

Flare is going to be a powerful tool for content management and single-sourcing. Just one of the little things it lets you do is export from the help files back to FrameMaker.

Ann Rockley speaks on Enterprise Content Management

Ann Rockley is one of Canada's���indeed North America's���foremost experts in organizing and presenting online information. Over the years, from information design to online documentation to information architecture to single sourcing to content management, Ann has devised and promoted the best methods for handling information. Now, she extends her expertise to managing information throughout an organization.

There's a brief teaser for the STC meeting here.