Photo by Vitaly Vlasov on Pexels.com On my quest for best practices for taxonomies I‘ve come across an insightful webinar on this topic hosted on BrightTALk and conducted by Scott Abel (the Content Wrangler) and Heather Hedden. Heather is a taxonomy consultant for intranets, enterprise content management, SharePoint, research databases, websites, e-commerce, etc. I‘ve summarized … Continue reading How to Create Taxonomies for Technical Documentation
Providing Content Recommendations to Improve UX
Photo by Huu1ef3nh u0110u1ea1t on Pexels.com I'm currently researching different ways to provide content recommendations to the users of our technical documentation. Content recommendations can dramatically improve the user experience of our readers, especially when it comes to guides containing hundreds and even thousands of topics. Because let's be honest, nobody wants to read a … Continue reading Providing Content Recommendations to Improve UX
MadCap Flare Tricks: Using Variables in your CSS
MadCap Flare (v 2019) now supports the use of variables (also known as custom properties) in the css. This is a great enhancement, as it allows users to keep their documentation look-and-feel consistent. It also saves time, since you can use an attribute variable in several styles and define it only once (in the root … Continue reading MadCap Flare Tricks: Using Variables in your CSS
Adding JS to DITA files
Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels.com This week I've been doing some research on how to make JS scripts work with DITA-based topics in the XML documentation plug-in for Adobe Experience Manager. While defining the scope of my research, I identified three possible approaches: Directly embed the script (and eventually, the accompanying CSS styles) into … Continue reading Adding JS to DITA files
CS50’s 2nd Problem Set – Readability
I managed to solve CS50's "readability" problem some weeks ago, but I couldn't find the time to explain how I worked it out until today. Anyway, a happy outcome is worth waiting for 🙂 This time, we were challenged to develop an algorithm that computes the grade level needed to comprehend some text (that must be … Continue reading CS50’s 2nd Problem Set – Readability
How an Emoji Becomes an Emoji
Some days ago I attended another amazing live session organized by the CS50's program professors Malan and Yu. This time the topic revolved around how an emoji ends up on your phone keyboard. As always, I'm glad that I could learn some new things. What is Really an Emoji? 🤓 The term "emoji" is a … Continue reading How an Emoji Becomes an Emoji
MadCap Flare Tricks: How to Show/Hide a Background Image via a Condition
My team has been confronted with a new challenge this week. We document several products in the same MadCap Flare project, some of them are publicly accessible and others are for internal use, and need to have an "Internal" background image. The background image is defined in the "body" element of our css: body { … Continue reading MadCap Flare Tricks: How to Show/Hide a Background Image via a Condition
MadCap Flare Tricks: How to Open External Links in a new Window by Default
I'd like to share with you a script I've found on the MadCap Forums that you can use to open external links (<a href>) by default in a new target frame. To do so, you can add the script below to the body part of your page layout (.flmsp): <script type="text/javascript">/*<![CDATA[*/ $("a[href^='https://']").attr('target="_blank"');/*]]>*/</script> Note that I've … Continue reading MadCap Flare Tricks: How to Open External Links in a new Window by Default
Creating Accessible Content with Link States and Colour Ratios
Hi again! I've just learned a couple of new tweaks you can make to your CSS to create accessible content and I want to share them with you. About Link States Although I've been working as a technical writer for several years now, I never had anything to do with link states. Until now. I … Continue reading Creating Accessible Content with Link States and Colour Ratios
SWAT Document Structure – Accessibility Techniques
I'm currently attending an Accessibility Bootcamp held by Deque that aims at improving the user experience of people with disabilities by making software and documentation WCAG compliant. We've had an insightful session about SWAT structure for documentation. As usual, I've jotted down the main ideas: Basic Document Structure Concepts Semantic structure is a concept that … Continue reading SWAT Document Structure – Accessibility Techniques
