Orange County STC Newsletter

www.stc.org May 2010 Vol. 49, No. 5

Introducing a HAT, Part 1By Jim Marchant, OCSTC Senior Member

Throughout my career, I’ve frequently had the opportunity to introduce new technology into the workplace. It began when, as a staff member

of my high school newspaper, I became deeply involved with a project to convert it from mimeograph to letterpress (a.k.a. hot type) printed produc-tion. If you aren’t familiar with those terms, you’re not old enough for this ride. Google ‘em.

In my short tenure as a technical writer, I’ve had two opportunities to intro-duce a Help-authoring tool (HAT) at a workplace. The first event was prom-ising enough that I recommended the same system, successfully, the second time. The tool is Author-It. In both cases, while I wasn’t the first technical writer at each company, I took over from the first persons to ever hold those positions, and who held them for a fairly short time (in the first case, nine months, in the second case, 18 months). I also undertook the conversions as a lone writer.

Each experience was markedly different. The companies are in disparate industries and have their own cultures. What’s more, the HAT application evolved rapidly between the two introductions, and I went through a two-year period of frequent job changes where I didn’t use it at all.

So, this is an account of the most recent experience. If you’re considering adopting Author-It, this article describes some transition issues for you to consider. If you’re considering adopting any HAT, especially where none (except for Microsoft Word) existed before, these experiences might help prepare you.

Full disclosure: My current IT director drove a hard financial bargain with Author-It Corp. A bargaining chip suggested by Author-It was that I report and publish my experiences. This is the report, produced (by mutual agree-ment) in my role as a senior member of STC and as a spokesperson for neither the HAT vendor nor my employer.

The SettingMy company, Kurtzman Carson Consultants LLC (KCC, a division of ComputerShare Limited), is about nine years old and holds a plurality share (~40 percent) of the bankruptcy servicing market in the US. Such firms are hired by major law firms that handle Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings for large companies. They handle the mountains of paperwork generated by a bankruptcy, such as mailing thousands of notices, receiving thousands of claims, tracking their financial impact, and issuing and tallying thousands of ballots.

KCC automates the process by imaging paper forms and adding metadata, then managing information flow electronically. The applications to address these processes are proprietary and developed in-house, using the Microsoft Outlook browser as a client. KCC’s customers have some limited access, using a web interface, to the applications for monitoring and data entry. The

Continued on Page 5 >

This Issue:

Introducing a HAT, Part 1 1

President’s Message 2

Next Meeting 3

Editor’s Desk 4

Seven Career Lessons I learned from Selling Ginsu Knives 6

April Meeting Review 7

EduNotes 8

OCSTC Employment Information 10

Orange Juice— Membership News 11

Orange Slice— Calendar of Events 12

May Meeting Topic 12

2  •  May 2010

President’s MessageBy Betsy Malone, OCSTC Chapter President

Thank you for the op-portunity to let me serve

OCSTC as president for the past two years. During my tenure, I’ve been extremely fortunate to work with dedicated council members whose tireless energy and innovative ideas have led the chapter to success. I’ve also had the pleasure of meet-ing many members at the

monthly meetings and developing relationships with many of you.

I’d like to thank the 2009–2010 Council members for their hard work, dedication, and time that they put forth to develop and strengthen OCSTC. I’d like to say a big thank you to:

Jane Baker and Suzanne Madison, Co-First Vice Presi-dents of Programs, for creating dynamic and broad-reaching meeting programs that covered many topics and reached diversified audiences. They put in lots of extra effort to make the speakers feel comfortable and to ensure that members were getting the topics they wanted to hear about.

Penny Marco and Pat Olsen, Co-Second Vice Presi-dents of Membership, for their enthusiasm and drive in making new members feel welcome, as well as re-taining existing members. They sent out new member-ship welcome packages and interviewed and intro-duced new members through TechniScribe articles.

Shannon Summers, Treasurer, for being fearless and jumping into her role as treasurer without looking back. Shannon’s tenacity and integrity have led the chapter to financial stability through developing annual budgets and making sure that the Council ad-hered to them. And, if that’s not enough, Shannon has joined the STC Community Funding and Support task force to make sure that OCSTC’s voice is heard and so that she can share collaborative ideas with other chapters and SIGs.

Neala Covell, Secretary, for taking time out of her busy schedule to help out the chapter. Her new ideas brought a fresh perspective to chapter strategies. Thank you for being our OCSTC scribe!

Jennifer Gardelle, TechniScribe Managing Editor , for working long hours to produce the award-winning OCSTC newsletter and for allowing OCSTC to main-tain its tradition of producing a printed newsletter. And thank you for “herding the cats” to get their articles in on time. (For that, I am especially thankful!)

Chapter ContactsOCSTC P.O. Box 28751 Santa Ana, CA 92799-8751

Chapter Fax: 949.830.7585

Web site: http://www.ocstc.org

Administrative CouncilPresident, Betsy Malone, pres@ocstc.org

Past President, Bruce Giddens, ipp@ocstc.org

1st Vice Presidents, Programs, Jane Baker and Suzanne Madison, 1vp@ocstc.org

2nd Vice Presidents, Membership, Penny Marco and Pat Olsen 2vp@ocstc.org

Treasurer, Shannon Summers, trea@ocstc.org

Secretary, Neala Covell, sec@ocstc.org

AppointeesTechniScribe Managing Editor, Jennifer Gardelle, techniscribe@ocstc.org

Public Relations, Open

Education, Bill Darnall, edu.bd@ocstc.org

Scholarship Chair, Carrie Damschroder, carried@hotmail.com

Webmaster, Jeff Randolph, erandolp@ix.netcom.com

Employment Manager, Betsy Malone, betsybythebeach@gmail.com

Committees Nominating Committee:

Bill Darnall, edu.bd@ocstc.org

Jeff Randolph, erandolp@ix.netcom.com

Bruce Giddens, ipp@ocstc.org

Continued on Page 7 >

May 2010  •  3

Next MeetingTopic: Writing for Regulated Industries

Speakers: Rhoda Brown-Christion Bill Darnall Noelle Demas Eri Hirumi Steven Meade Kathy Reed

When: Saturday, May 22, 9 a.m.–noon

Where: DoubleTree Club Hotel 7 Hutton Centre Drive Santa Ana, CA 92702 714.751.2400

Cost: Members with reservations . . . . . . . . . . . $26

Students with reservations . . . . . . . . . . . . $20

STC member, speaker-only . . . . . . . . . . . $12

Nonmembers with reservations . . . . . . . $31

Walk-ins, or those registering after the deadline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $35

No-shows billed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $26

Reservations:

Due by midnight, Thursday, May 20

Registration:

Online at http://www.ocstc.org/dinres.asp

Directions to the DoubleTree Club HotelMap of the I-405 and SR-55 area. The star below indi-cates the hotel location. Parking is FREE.

If you would like to receive email notifications about upcoming OCSTC meetings, visit http://www.ocstc.org/list_redirect.asp.

Click Join. This list broadcasts only meeting notices and STC announcements

CorrectionLast month, I printed the incorrect version of “2010 Spotlight Awards Winners,” by Carrie Damshroder. The correct version contains a couple of important winners:

Karen Bergen, Burt Courtier, Chris Botelho, and Randy Davidson won Best • of Show/Distinguished Award for their online publication, “Connecting Your Epson Printer to a Wireless Network.”

Gail Van Landingham, Cheryl Nemeth, and Kristian DelaCruz won an Excel-• lence Award in Technical Communication for their technical publication “Speech Recognition Quick Start.”

I apologize for any confusion.

TechniScribe Managing Editor

4  •  May 2010

Publication PoliciesTechniScribe is published 12 times a year as a benefit to the members of the Orange County Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. The goal of the publication is to reflect the interests, needs, and objectives of OCSTC members. TechniScribe strives to be an advocate for, and an inspiration to, technical communicators by keeping them connect-ed to each other and to opportunities for profes-sional growth.

Articles published in this newsletter may be re-printed in other STC publications if permission is obtained from the author, credit is properly given, and one copy of the reprint is sent to the Techni­Scribe managing editor.

Submission InformationThe editorial team retains and exercises the right to edit submitted and requested material for clarity, length, and appropriateness.

When submitting material, please remember to:

Include a 25-word biography about yourself.

Send articles in Word (doc, docx), Rich-Text For-mat (RTF), ASCII (txt), or in the body of an email message.

Send material to the managing editor (techni scribe@ocstc.org) five weeks before the date it will be published.

Editorial StaffManaging Editor Jennifer Gardelle Copyeditor Teresita del Sol Copyeditor Anne Stratford Copyeditor Barbara Young Proofreader Suzanne Madison Proofreader Michael Opstheegh Proofreader Sima Staav Web Version Jeff Randolph

Monthly Advertising Rates1/4 page $40 1/3 page $45 1/2 page $60 Full page $80

Subscriptions$10 a year to members of other STC chapters.

PrinterPrintWorks, Irvine, CA

Editor’s DeskBy Jennifer Gardelle, TechniScribe Managing Editor

When was the mo-ment you felt you

had made it in your cho-sen career? Has that time happened yet? If so, did you feel this was a career or a calling?

I talk to a lot of writers, and most love what they do and feel they do it well. That’s very admirable. It

sounds as though many have found their calling. But there are some who are still looking for their niche. If you’re such a person, read on.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, I recently took John Hall’s Advanced Career Strategies class, and one of the first questions he asked the class was what we were looking for. Did we want to find a career or did we want to find a calling?

Wow! Did we want to find a calling? This question really struck a chord with me, and I often think of it because that’s what I feel I’m looking for. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, and I’m happy to have one, but have I found my calling yet? Hmm… .

What’s the formula for discovering your calling? How do we know when we’ve found what we were meant to do? For starters, I think it’s crucial to re-search various careers and their associated required skill sets. Start with Do What You Are by Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger). This is a very helpful and insightful book to help you understand your personality type and what types of careers might work best for you. Then, go to http://www.personalitytype.com, and take an aptitude test.

Once you feel comfortable that you know what direction you should take, start networking with people in that field. Networking should help you to connect with people who could help you in your career (and maybe you can help them). Also, the more you talk to people who already have a similar dream job, the better you’ll know whether or not that field is truly a good fit for you.

I wish you all the best of luck in your search for your calling. If you’ve already found it, congratu-lations! And please share your story with other TechniScribe readers.

Have an article for TechniScribe? Please send it to me at techniscribe@ocstc.org. I’d love to print it here.

May 2010  •  5

technical writer builds Help content and functionality for the in-house applications as well as the public-facing web sites and contributes heavily to training materials. There are no translation requirements.

In the IT department, the technical writer is attached to the business analyst group, which is strongly document-oriented, producing application specifica-tions in Microsoft Word format that go through exten-sive review and approval on their way to becoming blueprints for developers writing code and blueprints for QA testing.

The Microsoft Word environment is mostly uncon-trolled with copious use of inline coding, and, for IT, templates have little influence.

There were a few pages of Help, with content that mostly mirrored the specifications. These were pro-duced from Microsoft Word as PDF files and dis-played from a link on the application pages.

The goal was to build far more robust Help, with extensive cross-referencing and such entry paths as a table of contents and an index. Furthermore, con-text sensitivity was needed to display Help relevant to the location in the applications from which it was invoked.

Getting StartedMy first task was to develop some Help with existing

tools, as a proto-type and to become familiar with some of the applications. A package of four simple, similar, but

separate applications was under development and due for release soon. I prepared Help files for them in Microsoft Word for eventual conversion to PDF files but designed a compact format that didn’t look like a printed document and with some graphics that resembled the GUI of the applications. Context sen-sitivity wasn’t necessary, as these applications each used a single window. However, I broke the Help into a handful of separate pages, adding home/previous/next navigation and, on the opening page, a linked table of contents.

These packages worked as expected but were difficult to maintain, as expected for PDF-based Help.

HAT ApprovalUpon getting a green light to look for a HAT tool, I began to download trial packages, compile reviews and critiques, and build a comparison table. While I touched on numerous candidates, I accurately pre-dicted that the finalists would be FrameMaker, Flare, Author-It, and RoboHelp.

My bosses were made aware of my inherent bias toward Author-It, as I had performed a similar search in 2005. I was out to confirm or revise the conclusions I reached then. Briefly, here, I’m summarizing my biases and revised findings.

FrameMaker. In 2005. I built a FrameMaker document for my portfolio to give it a trial. Its editing environ-ment felt arcane, and there were strange workarounds for some common functions. At that time, FrameMak-er was in the throes of several acquisitions, and its future with its latest owner, Adobe, was in doubt.

In 2009, I felt that many of FrameMaker’s new fea-tures were basically add-ons to the old structure so it could try to match features with newer products. Its structure was still arcane, and rumors occasionally arose that Adobe might still abandon it in favor of InDesign. Unless there was some legacy or external factor dictating its use, it didn’t seem to be a good prospect for filling a vacuum.

RoboHelp. In 2009, it seemed RoboHelp was just clinging to life as a .chm conversion tool. Its editing environment seemed completely outstripped by more modern tools.

Flare. In 2005, Flare was just barely released, a prod-uct with no reputation except the background of its founders.

In 2009, Flare looked promising, and I had seen a number of presentations at OCSTC meetings about it. I put the trial version through its paces. With a back-ground in relational database design (pre-SQL), I was a bit troubled by Flare’s flat-file architecture.

But I had the most difficulty with its tag-based markup environment. My HTML talents are at the upper-grade-school level, so I could get by, and Flare automated much of the process. But if I were ever able to recruit help, or occasional contributors, I feared they would be seriously handicapped by having to get comfortable with such a markup. A more Micro-soft Word-like interface would be easier for them—as well as for me.

Author-It. In 2005, Author-It was appealing on a num-ber of grounds. It was designed around content reuse and repurposing, was underpinned by a relational database, and mandated content chunking. So, I took the plunge then, confronted its peculiarities and its elaborate setup, and succeeded.

This prior experience was itself an advantage in select-ing Author-It in 2009, ensuring a speedier, smoother start-up. And by now, Author-It had improved on some clunky features and added others with potential, such as variant objects. It firmly held its first-place position, in my view.

Introducing a HAT, Part 1< Continued from Page 1

Continued on Page 9 >

6  •  May 2010

By Jack Molisani, STC Fellow

In the mid 1990s, I was laid off from my full time job as a sales engineer with a bank technology company.

I spent months looking for a new engineering posi-tion, but no one was hiring.

At the time, a friend of my family owned a company that put booths into home-and-garden shows and also owned a franchise for selling Ginsu knives. One of her regular workers had to go out of town, and she asked me if I could cover for the worker while she was gone. Sure, why not, I thought. I could use the money.

They gave me a crash course in how to demonstrate Ginsu knives and sent me off to work a show. I did well and ended up working the home-and-garden show circuit for the rest of the summer.

When the economy picked up again, I still couldn’t find work as a sales engineer, but I was able to find work as a technical writer—a profession I found I liked and was good at.

It has been 15 years since that summer and I now own a technical writing and staffing company of my own, but I’ll always remember seven lessons I learned from selling Ginsu knives:

Have a Good Product to SellYes, Ginsu knives really can cut hammers and then slice a tomato paper thin. To this day, I still have a Ginsu knife in my kitchen cutlery drawer for cutting bread and one in the car for cutting radiator hoses. The product really works!

The lesson: Find a product (or service) that really works and sell it.

Stand Behind Your ProductGinsu knives rarely get dull or break, but it does hap-pen (especially when you use one to saw down a six foot lemon tree!). The knife’s lifetime guarantee says you can mail it back or present the knife to any sales-person anywhere in the world, and they’ll replace it for free, no questions asked. And they do!

The lesson: Stand behind your product and guarantee its quality.

Attract AttentionIn pitchman lingo, your “tip” is the crowd that has gathered to watch you demonstrate your product. The bigger the tip, the more people who will buy—not just in gross numbers, but also in percentage of closes. But before you can sell your product or service, you have to build your tip—people who are looking at what you have to sell. The problem is that people today are so bombarded with advertisements that they tend to ignore sales people, or worse, go out of their way to avoid them.

In the pitch business, people rarely walk up to a booth to see what you’re selling. You have to attract their at-tention, call them over, be entertaining, be interesting.

The lesson: Customers rarely just call to buy your product or service. You have to find them. Use social media, live webinars, direct mail, anything you can think of to attract positive attention from your target audiences. You have to make sales calls, send emails, and contact people.

As Chellie Campbell, the author of Zero to Zillionaire says, “There’s money in the phone and I’m calling me some today!” She even painted her phone gold and wears gold fingernail polish on her dialing finger to remind her there’s money in the phone. I can’t say I’ve whipped out the gold paint, but I do have a sign on my desk with those exact words to remind me to pick up the phone and find more business for my company.

Note: Not everyone is an extrovert, but “gold calling” does get easier with practice. I once saw a sign that says, “Fishing is not easy. If it were easy it would be called ‘catching’ and everybody would be doing it!”

The same applies to gold calling.

The Closer Your Tip Is to Your Joint, the More Sales You’ll Make OK, this one will take some explaining: As I said, your “tip” is the group watching your pitch (or hanging around waiting for you to start if you work the room properly). Your “joint” is the booth from which you demonstrate your product.

There’s a datum in the pitch business that the farther away people stand from your joint, the less likely they are to buy. Similarly, the closer people are to your joint, the more likely they are to buy. Most people, however, stop about 10 feet away from a booth, cross their arms defensively, and think, “OK, try to impress me.”

I’ll let you in on a secret: Pitchmen know people are hesitant to walk up to a sales person, which is why potential customers usually stop 10 feet away from your booth. So, to get people to move closer (and thus more likely to buy), a pitchman might say, “Now, I’m going to show how the knife really can cut a hammer, but the people in the back are going to have to move forward to see the shavings.”

Knowing that people don’t like to get close to people (especially sales people), the pitchman will take three steps backwards in his or her booth to make a com-fortable “space” for the audience to move forward into. But then, once everyone moves forward to see

Seven Career Lessons I learned from Selling Ginsu Knives

Continued on Page 9 >

May 2010  •  7

April Meeting ReviewBy Roger Hunnicut, OCSTC Member

Online networking is critically important today in finding a job in the shortest amount of time.

That’s the essence of what Laura Ann LoCicero taught us in a very informative, practical presen-tation at our April meeting. She knows this from personal experience. A career transition led her to discover that we must be constantly looking to partner with like-minded professionals—lots of them! A network of people will function like an antenna for finding job openings. We need to build networks while we still have jobs, not in a panic when we are unem-ployed.

Laura Ann covered four methods to help us build online networks: online groups, personal marketing web sites (PMW), recruiters, and tips on keeping the network grow-ing.

The primary online groups she recommended are LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com), Facebook (http://www.facebook.com), and Twitter (http://twitter.com). We should participate in applicable groups and discussions on these sites and constantly look for like-minded members we can invite to join our networks. Then, we look at our contacts’ contacts (for example, second-level LinkedIn contacts) for people who are directly related to our interests and ask to be introduced to them.

Once we’ve joined some groups, such as those on LinkedIn, we should think of new group network-ing topics. Next, we ask our contacts if any of the topics are of interest to them. Based on their response, we select and create new groups and only invite people who would be a good addition to that topic. Don’t expect people to start contribut-ing immediately to a group—that can take several months.

The next method Laura Ann covered was how to create a PMW, which presents our résumés, biogra-phies, success stories, work samples, and testimoni-als. The primary difference between a PMW and LinkedIn is that LinkedIn is a long page of infor-mation, whereas a PMW contains multiple pages. Each PMW page fits neatly on the screen, and page navigation is done via tabs. Widgets performing various functions are available, many of which are free. One of the best widgets lets a reader scroll through work samples.

Laura Ann’s favorite site to create PMWs is Yola (http://www.yola.com), but she said there are

dozens of free web hosting sites available. She gave a number of tips on how to structure the PMW, includ-ing using separate pages, keeping sections short, focusing on one job position, summarizing your most marketable information, a résumé download button, and easy navigation.

Our goal for the PMWs is to attract recruiters and po-tential employers, not anonymous people via search-engine results. Therefore, we must take responsibility to market the PMW heavily. We do this by publishing

the PMW link on our other online sites and on our materials: business cards, letterhead, résumé, email signature, etc.

Laura Ann gave several clever tips. One tip was to include direct links to well-qualified professionals in the field, such as technical writers, in-structional designers, and compliance documentation experts. Naturally, recruiters want access to a pool of tal-ent when they have openings, so the list will entice recruiters back to our

PMWs.

Another tip was to ask recruiters to send you their openings, with your promise to pass them along to your network. Think of how nice it would be to have a constant stream of openings to consider applying to.

Laura Ann presented her useful networking sugges-tions in a clear, friendly manner. I’m sure she looks forward to seeing all of us online, so let’s Link, PMW, and Tweet our way to our next job!

Bill Darnall, Jeff Randolph, Adrienne Escoe, and Bruce Giddens, the OCSTC Nominating Committee, for their endless efforts in recruiting new talent for the OCSTC Council.

Thank you also to Carrie Damshroder for spearhead-ing the Scholarship Committee, Michael Opsteegh for heading up the Web Site Committee, and to all of you whom I may have neglected to mention by name but who’ve somehow helped to shape OCSTC.

And finally, my appreciation to all OCSTC members for your continued support of our local chapter and for providing the Council with your valuable feed-back, which allowed us to plan for future generations of technical communicators.

Thank you again for a fantastic OCSTC experience!

President’s Message< Continued from Page 2

8  •  May 2010

EduNotesBy Bill Darnall, OCSTC Education

Digital Publishing

The other day, while surfing the Web, I followed a link to the University of Indiana’s School of Li-

brary and Information Science at www.slis.indiana.edu. Drilling down, I discovered a course outline, “S656 (section 27047): Advanced XML: Electronic Publishing Standards and Systems,” taught by John A. Walsh.

The outline included a list of 10 items identified as “fundamental technologies underlying digital pub-lishing …” I don’t know about you, but I get con-fused with all of the acronyms and terms. I thought it might be useful to provide TechniScribe readers with summary identification of these “fundamental technologies.”

XML•

XSLT•

XPath•

XSL-FO•

SVG•

XHTML•

CSS•

JavaScript•

PostScript•

PDF•

XML means Extensible Markup Language. Note XML and HTML are based on the more complex Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). HTML specifies what each tag and each attribute mean. However, XML uses tags only to delimit strings or pieces of data. The data-reading application interprets the XML-delimited data. XML is a meta-language, or a language used to define other languages. Use XML to define HTML (see XHTML).

XSLT means Extensible Style Sheet Transform. Use XSLT to describe a style sheet for XML documents. XSLT for XML is analogous to CSS for HTML.

XPath is “a syntax for defining parts of an XML document,” according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Use XPath to identify a path through the document’s logical structure.

XSL-FO means Extensible Style Sheet Language Formatting Objects. The purpose of XSL-FO is to

provide a mechanism for formatting XML data for print and other output media.

SVG means Scalable Vector Graphics. SVG defines graphics in XML format. Graphics frequently appear as links, which have a picture file at the end. How-ever, the SVG specification lets one use XML markup to draw vector graphics objects directly in an XML file.

XHTML is an XML-based version of HTML. XHTML is a work in progress. The W3C recently published “A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML W3C Working Draft 4 March 2010.”

CSS means Cascading Style Sheet. CSS is not HTML. CSS is a style sheet language. Style sheets offer far more formatting choices than HTML. CSS styles take up much less space than HTML’s formatting options. For example, a style can apply to multiple elements, including pages.

JavaScript is an object-oriented scripting language. JavaScript finds client applications and host applica-tions. However, most applications are client-related. JavaScript, implemented as part of a web browser application, provides efficient user interfaces and dynamic web sites.

PostScript is a computer language used primarily to generate graphical images (including text) in a device-independent manner. PostScript describes these graphical images. PostScript describes images with lines, curves, and filled areas, including bitmap overlays.

PDF means Portable Document Format. PDF is an open standard for representing electronic docu-ments. As a document format, PDF has several

advantages over PostScript. PDF includes the ability to access directly individual pages.

ConclusionEach new day seems to bring with it a new term. Many of the terms are specialized. Notwithstanding, many terms have slightly different mean-ings to different practitioners. These differences are why it’s necessary to test each application with different browsers. If you would like to see ad-

ditional information about John Walsh’s course, go to his site at www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/jawalsh/teaching/slis/s656/2010s/. For general web-building information, go to http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp.

May 2010  •  9

Source ControlI ran into a serious snag on one issue: Some develop-ers in the IT department had earlier experiences with several tools and noticed that Flare and RoboHelp can use source control applications (like Subversion and Visual SourceSafe) to store their files. They seized on this issue and felt that, if it were an option, then it had to be superior to anything else. After all, they used Subversion for their code and understood it, so why wouldn’t it work for narrative language?

I didn’t make much progress in explaining that none of the tools was thoroughly integrated with source control systems nor relied on them for maintaining text-chunk relationships. The developers seemed to think that code chunks could be matched with Help chunks, could be checked in and out with them, and would fit and blend perfectly with varying versions of code. I tried to explain that my text might repurpose chunks that came from (to them) random locations elsewhere in the content that bore no relationship to the code chunks they were modifying.

Author-It doesn’t offer the source control option, un-less it’s to check in an entire assembled Help package at once. Updates would replace all packaged objects in source control, effectively neutralizing source control’s ability to track changes. This offers little or no benefit to the technical communicator, the code developer, or the user. Author-It instead uses a JET or SQL database, and database objects aren’t suitable for code source control.

This issue simmered for a while, and I declared that any of the tools could do the job, but eventually my choice, Author-It, was selected in early July.

In 2005, I set up Author-It to produce Word/PDF Help. In 2009, the deliverable is HTML. (Author-It produces both “HTML Help,” a.k.a. .chm files, and “HTML Pages,” regular HTML that closely resembles .chm Help. KCC needed “pages.”) My rudimentary HTML talents were about to be tested!

Come back next month, for more on Introducing a HAT, in part 2 of Jim’s article.

Introducing a HAT, Part 1< Continued from Page 5

the demonstration, the pitchman will take three steps forward again and be right there nose-to-nose with the tip and then continue the demonstration.

The lesson: Many people can’t confront a sales pitch right from the start, so have a way to get them in-volved first. Offer a free webinar, a low cost intro service, etc. Then, continue your presentation—and land more clients.

Ask for the Sale As a pitchman, you can do the most beautiful dem-onstration in the world, but if you end it with, “There you go, thanks for watching!” people will just smile, nod, and walk away empty handed. But, if you ask for the sale, you might get one.

Or better yet, assume they are going to buy and just direct them to your helper (see my next point). And, once someone buys, others will as well. (I’m sure psychologists have a label for it, but I call it breaking the ice or safety in numbers—many people just hate to go first.)

The lesson: You have to ask for the sale. (As my dad once said while fishing, “Those fish aren’t going to jump in the boat by themselves, you know!”) The same holds true when asking your employer for a raise—you have to ask.

Get a Helper People hate to wait, especially in line to buy a prod-uct. So, if you did a good job of building a large tip, get an assistant who can take money and hand the customer the product. Plus, you can then start your pitch again as new people wander by, which gives you the added benefit of new people seeing others buy the product and wonder what the excitement is about.

The lesson: Once you find you are losing sales be-cause there are “too many customers,” it’s time to hire a helper to keep the money flowing. Keep doing what you do best (pitching) and let your assistant handle the administration and delivery.

Be Open to New OpportunitiesNever in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d be selling Ginsu knives to make money. Me, a gradu-ate of Tulane University with a degree in Computer Engineering!

But you know what? I can’t even begin to estimate how much that summer selling Ginsu knives has furthered my career.

After that summer, interviewing for a job was a breeze. I used to be nervous when interviewing, but

Seven Career Lessons< Continued from Page 9

Did you know that shopping at Amazon.com is not only a great place to find books and other items, it’s also a great way to give back to the OCSTC? The next time you shop

at Amazon, please access the site via OCSTC.org. Amazon donates a percentage of your purchase to the chapter.

Thank you!

Continued on Page 11 >

OCSTC Employment InformationOur job listing is entirely online at the OCSTC web site. Pages are updated as jobs are submitted.

Staff Jobshttp://www.ocstc.org/employme.asp

Contract Jobshttp://www.ocstc.org/contractme.asp

Free Job Postinghttp://www.ocstc.org/jobsubmit.asp

InquiriesIf you have an inquiry, email our employment manager, Betsy Malone, at betsybythebeach@gmail.com.

Society-Level Job ListingsSTC maintains job listings on the Internet. You can download the listings from the STC web site at http://jobs.stc.org.

10  •  May 2010

Society Pages

STC Mission StatementSTC advances the theory and practice of technical communication across all user abilities and all media.

Positioning StatementSTC helps you design effective communication for a technical world through information sharing and industry leadership.

The Society for Technical Communication (STC) is the world’s largest organization for technical com-municators.

Its members include writers, editors, illustrators, printers, publishers, photographers, educators, and students.

Membership is open to anyone engaged in some phase of technical communication, interested in the arts and sciences of technical communication, and in allied arts and sciences.

Society for Technical Communication 9401 Lee Highway, Suite 300 Fairfax, VA 22031-1803

703.522.4114 (voice); http://www.stc.org

TechniScribe Copyright and Trademark StatementOCSTC invites writers to submit articles that they wish to be considered for publication. Authors retain copyright to their work and implicitly grant a license to this newsletter to publish the work once in print and to publish it once online for an indefinite period of time. In your cover letter, please let the editor know if this article has appeared elsewhere, and if it has been submitted for consideration to other publications.

The design and layout of this newsletter are copy-righted as © STC, 2010.

Some articles might refer to companies or products whose names are covered by a trademark or regis-tered trademark. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Reference to a specific product does not constitute an endorsement of the product by OCSTC or by STC.

ColophonTechniScribe is written using Microsoft Word, and laid out using Adobe InDesign CS3 for Microsoft. Gill Sans and Palatino Linotype are used for heading and text fonts. PDFs are produced using Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.

TechniScribe relies on the following editorial refer-ences for style: American Heritage Dictionary, Chicago Manual of Style, and Words into Type.

May 2010  •  11

Society PagesOrange Juice: Membership NewsBy Pat Olsen, OCSTC 2nd Vice President, Membership

The membership rosters have been purged, and

the results are in. OCSTC now has 82 members with no new members joining in 2010. The Alberta STC Chapter won the STC Membership Renewal Challenge with 55.81 percent membership renewal, closely followed by the Philadelphia Metro and Chicago chapters.

As a senior member, I was disappointed that we didn’t have a higher percentage of renewing mem-bers, yet I totally understand the drop in membership with the status of our economy. I hope we can grow the membership in our chapter, as I feel keeping up with the tools of our industry and networking are critical to careers at this time.

Meet Senior Member Connie CannonAs a young girl, Connie wanted to be a concert pia-nist. However, life led her down a different career path. Connie is the mother of 22-year-old Amanda (who’s studying to be a holistic health practitioner) and the caretaker of three cats, Kitty, Ollie, and Freddy.

At the University of California, Irvine, Connie was an English major with no thought of a future career path, although she was certain she didn’t want to teach. She chose to major in English because she liked to read and fancied herself a writer. Connie’s college essays, articles, and poems received some flattering attention, but didn’t lead to anything after graduation. It wasn’t until her daughter started school that she was finally forced to assess her job skills.

Connie signed up with a temp agency, where she took all the software tutorials and managed to pass a typ-ing test. After a number of forgettable assignments, she was placed as an administrative assistant to a VP of software development at a company that has since fallen off the nether regions of her résumé.

One day, Connie said to her boss: “These manuals re-ally suck! You should redo them.” And her boss, being a positive, can-do sort of person, said: “You do it.”

Connie was put under the supervision of senior tech-nical writer, Dick Bame. The plan was that she would revise the user guide, and Dick would be responsible for the administrator’s guide. Dick had been a techni-cal writer for 20 years and, at the height of the soft-ware boom, didn’t get out of bed for less than $50 an hour. Connie marveled at this and privately thought she would be willing to work for considerably less.

Dick introduced her to the mysteries of formatting and screenshots and generally gave her a lot of use-ful advice. Now, years later, Connie can only imag-ine how annoyed he must have been.

Connie is first technical writing project was success-ful. The company soon hired her as an official techni-cal writer.

That was the misty dawn of Connie’s technical writing career, and she’s never looked back. They say good fortune happens when opportunity meets preparation. Connie feels lucky to have found a profession that she enjoys and is pretty good at. Con-nie recently read a statistic that, on average, techni-cal writers are the highest paid English majors. Go figure.

Connie is not only well-versed in the latest tools and methodologies, she’s certified as a business ana-lyst and ScrumMaster. A critically-trained creative writer, Connie has experience writing for a variety of audiences and several industries. She’s currently a contract writer at First American Corporation.

Want to know more about Connie? Check out her portfolio at www.motifproductions.com or see her artistic side with her jewelry made of semi-precious stones at www.themysticmuse.com.

no longer. If I can stand on a box and sell Ginsu knives to a crowd of 50 sales-resistant show attend-ees, I can certainly “sell” myself in an interview! I learned how to

pitch ideas to people, state my case, and sell • my point of view;

attract positive attention, be interesting, be • heard; and

communicate the benefits of what I was sell-• ing, and I learned to ask for the sale.

When was the last time you learned a new skill? Spoke at a conference? Asked for a raise? Be bold. Take a fork in the road you might not normally choose. You never know where it might lead you!

Jack Molisani is an STC Fellow and the president of ProSpring Technical Staffing, an agency specializing in staff and contract technical writers (www.Prospring-Staffing.com). He also produces the LavaCon Conference on Online Branding and New Media (www.lavacon.org). Follow Jack on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/JackMolisani.

Seven Career Lessons< Continued from Page 9

May Meeting TopicAbout the PresentationBack by popular demand! For our May meeting, we’ll combine two programming favorites—our Saturday morning breakfast meeting with a progression-style workshop.

Many industries are controlled by laws, rules, and/or regulations that require very specific documentation. This is your opportunity to hear from professionals in a variety of these industries and discover what you need to know, where to get this information, and what opportunities there are in these industries.

At the end of the meeting, a Garmin GPS will be raffled. So, come and enjoy the meeting, and maybe you’ll be the lucky winner (and find your way home!).

Speakers and TopicsRhoda Brown-Christion, Writing for Healthcare in a Regulated World

Bill Darnall, Writing for SOX

Noelle Demas, Pharmaceutical Regulatory Medical Writing

Eri Hirumi, Documentation in the Medical Device Industry

Steven Meade, Technical Authoring in the Aerospace Industry

Kathy Reed, Banking Regulations Today

For more on the topics and the speakers’ bios, visit www.ocstc.org.

Orange Slice: Calendar of EventsDate Event Location TimeMay 11 OCSTC Council Meeting Airport Executive Suites, Irvine 6 p.m.–7 p.m.

May 22OCSTC Chapter MeetingMultiple speakers, “Writing for Regu-lated Industries”

DoubleTree Club Hotel, 7 Hutton Centre Dr., Santa Ana, CA, 92707, 714.751.2400 9 a.m.–noon

June 1 OCSTC Council Meeting Airport Executive Suites, Irvine 6 p.m.–7 p.m.

June 15OCSTC Chapter MeetingA panel discussion, “Technical Editing in the 21st Century Global Economy”

DoubleTree Club Hotel, 7 Hutton Centre Dr., Santa Ana, CA, 92707, 714.751.2400 6 p.m.–9 p.m.