Savor the season with Scriptorium: Our favorite holiday recipes
Once again, it’s the time of year when we start… well, continue talking about good food. This blog is full of cozy recipes from our team.
Food & fun
Favorite holiday recipes from the Scriptorium team
To help with your holiday meal planning, the Scriptorium team put a list of our favorite recipes together. Some are old favorites, some are new additions, but all are delicious!
Nightmare on ContentOps Street (podcast)
In episode 136 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle unveils horror stories of content ops gone horribly wrong.
Holiday recipes from Scriptorium
Here’s a list of our favorite recipes from the Scriptorium team. Of course, we focus on the desserts first, but don’t worry—we’ve included non-dessert options.
Metadata and taxonomy in your spice rack
Our internal Slack workspace has channels for projects, events, and other work-related items, but of course our most popular channel is #thefoodchannel, where we share recipes, restaurant recommendations, and general foodie discussions.
Content strategy monster mashup
In a content strategy project, it’s important to be aware of the monsters lurking in the shadows and waiting to pounce on your project. Here are the gruesome details:
Trick or treat? Halloween content strategy
If done properly, a new content strategy will bring added value to your organization. The transition itself is not always easy, and the success of the projects depends on your stakeholders. Much like trick or treating, you never know what to expect when someone “opens the door” to change:
Content strategy, a food analogy
If content is like food, then content strategy is the delivery system, whether a restaurant or a home cook feeding a family. Scriptorium is full of people who like to eat and cook, so food analogies are always popular around here.
Your content is not special
You. You over there with the finicky formatting and the inability to use templates and the hours of adjusting graphics when you add a paragraph.
Yes. You.
The horror! More content strategy monsters!
The ghoulish nasties I depicted two years ago in Content Strategy vs. The Undead continue to haunt content strategy implementations and information development projects.
They just… won’t… DIE!
However, they are not the only monsters that can terrorize your content strategy implementation.
Plumber’s guide to content workflows
Last week I was working in my home office when I heard an odd hissing sound. Upon investigation, I found that my hot water heater had decided to empty itself onto the basement floor.
Fortunately I had some failsafes in place; the heater’s pressure release valve was doing its job by routing scalding hot water onto the floor, and my floor is slightly slanted toward a drain in the floor. This got me thinking (because my brain is oddly wired this way) about failsafes in content workflows.
Webcast: Content Strategy vs. The Undead
Implementing a content strategy often involves overcoming significant technological and cultural challenges, but some of these challenges are so scary, so heinous, that they earn a place among the undead because they Just. Won’t. Die!
In this webcast, which debuted at Lavacon 2014, Bill Swallow takes a look at these nightmare-inducing monsters—from unrelenting copy-and-paste zombies to life-draining, change-avoiding vampires—and shows you what can be done to keep your content strategy implementation from turning into a fright fest.
How fast food can help your content strategy
These days, I generally avoid fast food, but it’s hard to pass up good French fries every now and then. Look beyond those yummy fries, and you can learn some valuable lessons that apply to content strategy.
Celebrating the good stuff (Blog Secret Santa)
Or: A stranger takes over the Scriptorium blog and gets all enthusiastic about tone of voice
Merry Christmas, Scriptorium readers. And, Sarah O’Keefe, an especially Merry Christmas to you. I’m your writer, Santa, and this is your Blog Secret Santa gift. (Everyone else: yep, hi. I’m a random stranger writing for Sarah’s blog. Because Christmas is fun.)
And here’s your present: Four websites that perform the rare magic trick of taking things that are normally really boring and making them entertaining.
Content strategy vs. the undead
Implementing a content strategy can involve overcoming many challenges. Some of these challenges can be quite scary and hazardous to your strategy. In fact, overcoming these challenges is a lot like battling the undead.
Stairway to Həll
We’ve been in our “new” offices in Durham for about a year now. Overall, I’m quite happy to be here, nice building, good restaurants for lunch, lock on the door to keep sales people out…all those things.
Dear Verizon call center
My voice mail randomly bailed on me, and after much Googling and forum snooping, I still couldn’t get it to cooperate. I couldn’t log in, and no one could leave me a message. So, I went down to the Verizon store, intent on giving the (very friendly) folks there a piece of my mind.
Content strategy for foodies
Content is like food. At its best, it’s a carefully choreographed experience, like dining at a fine restaurant.
But will it blend?
In choral music, “blend” refers to bringing together a diverse group of voices into a pleasing sound in which no single voice is dominant. As technical communication moves into a more collaborative approach to content, it occurs to me that both writers and musicians need to blend. Here are some choral archetypes and their writerly equivalents:
- Soloists—singers with big, powerful voices or writers with distinctive styles—are a challenge to blend. The singers must reduce their volume to match the voices around them and sing the music without adding ornamentation. Writers must refrain from their favorite distracting rhetorical flourishes.
- Section anchors—journeyman singers who know their parts cold and provide support to others singing the same part. Section anchors may not have the vocal quality of a soloist, but they are competent singers who are always on pitch, learn the music quickly, and follow the director. On the writing side, this is a person who writes competently, knows the product being documented, always follows the style guide, and learns quickly. In a writing group, these may be the team leaders. They are not necessarily the flashiest or the most gifted writers, but their content ranges from acceptable to excellent.
- Supporting players—these singers lack confidence, but can learn their part and sing it, provided that they have support from a section anchor. Left to their own devices, they may drift off into another part (usually abandoning harmony to sing the melody line). But as long as someone nearby is singing their part with them, they can stay on pitch and contribute their voices. This equates to writers, often with less experience, who need support, encouragement, and editing to stay within the style guide. They need help in most aspects of the content creation process. Over time, supporting players can improve and grow into more confident section anchors both in writing and in singing.
- Blissfully tone deaf—Fortunately, many people who are tone deaf (or simply cannot write) are aware of their limitation. But if you’ve spent any time at all in a volunteer choir, you’ve probably experienced people who make up for their lack of pitch by singing louder. In a writing context, your best bet for the tone-deaf (short of a new job!) is to give them assignments that minimize actual writing, such as creating basic reference information (not a lot of room to maneuver).
Our challenge, as writers, is that we have been accustomed to working solo, and now we must learn to blend our authorial voice into the larger group. The skills that make great soloists are not the same skills that make great contributors.
Some Friday fun: tech writing in movies
Here’s a movie montage I found on YouTube featuring scenes of characters either offering or reading procedures:
Enjoy!
Finding the blogging superhero in yourself
Power blogger.
That’s a new phrase to me, and it was new to Maria Langer, too, as she noted in her An Eclectic Mind blog. As part of a podcast panel, she was asked to offer advice on how to become a power blogger. Some of her fellow panelists mentioned the quantity of posts, but Maria’s focus was elsewhere:
The number of blog posts a blogger publishes should have nothing to do with whether he’s a power blogger. Instead, it should be the influence the blogger has over his readership and beyond. What’s important is whether a blog post makes a difference in the reader’s life. Does it teach? Make the reader think? Influence his decisions? If a blogger can consistently do any of that, he’s a power blogger.
I couldn’t agree more. I appreciate reading any blog that gives me useful information or analysis that hadn’t occurred to me. For example, I recently had issues with a new PC I’m using at home as a media center. It was not picking up all the channels in my area, and an excellent blog post helped me solve the problem with little fuss. To me, that author is a power blogger.
What I frankly find irritating—and certainly not my worth my time—are blogs that are basically what I’ll call “link farms”: posting links or excerpts from other blogs with no valuable information added. I’m quite the cynic, so when I stumble upon such a blog, I figure the blogger is merely trying to generate Google hits and ad revenue, is lazy, or both. Quantity—particularly when said quantity is composed of rehashed material from other bloggers—does not a power blogger make.
When it comes to contributing to this blog, I try to write posts that have a least one nugget of helpful information, analysis, or humor, and I think that’s true of the posts from my fellow coworkers. (At the risk of sounding like I’m bragging about my coworkers, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read one of their posts and thought, “That’s smart!” or “That’s cool!”) Frankly, I’d rather not write anything at all than to publish something just because it’s been a few days since I posted. And I have a lot more respect for bloggers who write quality posts once in a while over those who put out lots of material that is borrowed from elsewhere.
And on that note, I’ll leave you with a short clip showing superheroes using their powers for a practical solution. (See, I’m trying to entertain you, too!)
More cowbell!
About a year ago, we added Google Analytics to our web site. I have done some research to see what posts were the most popular in the past year:
- The clear winner was our FrameMaker 9 review. With 21 comments, I think it was also the most heavily commented post. Interestingly, the post itself is little more than a pointer to the PDF file that contains the actual review.
- InDesign CS4 = Hannibal post, which discussed InDesign’s encroachment on traditional FrameMaker features.
- A surprise…a post from 2006 in which Mark Baker discussed the merits (or lack thereof) of DITA in To DITA or not to DITA
Our readers appear to like clever headlines, because I don’t think the content quality explains the high numbers for posts such as:
We noticed this pattern recently, when a carefully crafted, meticulously written post was ignored in favor of a throwaway post dashed off in minutes with a catchy title (Death to Recipes!).
For useful, thoughtful advice on blogging, I refer you to Tom Johnson and Rich Maggiani. I, however, have a new set of blogging recommendations:
- Write catchy titles
- Have an opinion, preferably an outrageous one
- More cowbell
Death to Recipes!
I love food. I enjoy cooking and I especially enjoy eating. One of my favorite web sites is epicurious.com, and the kitchen shelf devoted to cookbooks sags alarmingly. Many Saturday mornings, you will find me here.
But I am not happy about how recipes have insinuated themselves into my work life. For some reason, the recipe is the default example of structured content. Look at what happens when you search Google for xml recipe example. Recipes are everywhere, not unlike high fructose corn syrup. Unfortunately, I am not immune to the XML recipe infiltration myself.
I understand the appeal. Recipes are:
- highly structured content
- well understood
But I think the example is getting a little tired and wilted. Let’s try working with something new. Try out a new kind of lettuce, er, example. This week, I’m trying to write a very basic introduction to structured authoring, and I’m paralyzed by my inability to think of any non-recipe examples.
I’m considering using a glossary as an example. After all, it’s a highly structure piece of content whose organization is well understood. Maybe I’ll use food items as my glossary entries. Baby steps…
PS It’s totally unrelated, but this article about two chefs eating their way through Durham (“nine restaurants in one night, at least five hours of eating and drinking”) is quite fun.
Your beautiful life
I just installed a wireless mouse on my PC here in the office. The instructions that came with the mouse have some interesting turns of phrase, including this gem:
[The mouse] combines with 27MH RF wireless technology, user-defined keys, and outstanding design, so that you can use it freely to improve your efficiency and enjoy your beautiful life from the high technology.
Yes, I often enjoy my beautiful life with high technology. Don’t you?
