Once or twice in my career as a technical writer I've been lucky enough to work with an editor. But often we technical writers work alone and have to proofread our own writing.
My grandfather was a newspaper editor, so I learned at a young age, that spelling mistakes and grammatical errors were unacceptable. I guess that's why I have a highly-tuned radar for typos. But I admit I miss things too. Here are a few tricks to help you avoid the embarrassment of poor proofreading:
1. Read the docum...
More
Copying a Space from one Confluence wiki instance to another
At the moment I have a Confluence wiki installed on my desktop. Next we want to install Confluence on a server to test the integration of the wiki with our Umbraco website and LDAP security.
So that we can demo Confluence to others in the group quickly, I need to copy a Space from my local instance of Confluence into the new instance on the server. I've searched the Confluence documentation, and it looks like I need to export the space as a zipped XML archive, and then import the xml archive ...
More
Keeping the writing fresh
Working as a technical writer, it's easy to focus on the tools we use. Learning new tools and implementing new processes is fun and exciting.
But often we have to update the same manuals, write the same documents, produce content using the same branding and styles over and over. And our writing can become dull and lifeless.
I was thinking about this the other day when I was out for dinner. I was eating a salad, picking around some particularly limp lettuce. I wanted to toss this salad in t...
More