Category Archives: technology

Auto Share Blog Updates

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Blogs need visitor love sometimes and one way to show people that your blog is alive and well is to post updates to a wide variety of social networking sites. However, you can use your RSS/Atom feed to link it up with other places around the internet.

It is a tiresome practice to log onto each social network and post a URL straight to your latest post after you have published it. Unless you use an enterprise-level paid social networking suite, the individual blog posters are relegated to free or limited services.

Ben Woelk asked me a couple of months ago if I am posting my new entries on Twitter and Facebook. Currently I am advertising WriteTechie on Twitter but not Facebook yet. I’m looking at testing a  couple of services before committing to one.

The other place I advertise my blog is on LinkedIn and MySTC. I added the RSS feed into my profile and it automatically updates new posts on the bottom of each profile. These two profiles are where visitors can easily visit and read my blog.

It may be slightly dangerous to have a service automatically tweet and post blog updates on social networking sites beacuse the services rely on  RSS feeds to update. In addition, there appears to be little personalization to automatically tweet the post but it is a start to bring in new and returning readers here.

Quick Usability Testing

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At work, I was asked to create a map to guide our clients to specific workstations that have Kurzweil optical character recognition (OCR) software. Students use the OCR reader to scan in documents and use the computer read the text for them. Given the task, it had to be simple to read and understand quickly by anyone who doesn’t know where the workstations are at.

Kurzweil Location - SRC 120

Location for Kurzweil Software

Kurzweil Location - SRC 2nd Floor

Location for Kurzweil Software

When I finished drafting up a couple of maps, I surveyed two of my co-workers. I picked two people who have a wide varying degree of knowledge with regard to locations on campus. It was smart for me to pick  two individuals, one who is unfamiliar with the area and another who knows exactly where to go.

My first tester was one of our student workers in the department. Since she is a freshman and new to our community college, she was very useful to develop my maps to help our clients who may be unfamiliar with campus. The second person I tested the maps with was one of our department secretaries. I included one our secretaries in my quick usability testing because they are very familiar with campus and they can add details that I may miss that could be important.

My results were positive. Both testers quickly understood the map for SRC 120; however, they had difficulty understanding the SRC 2nd Floor map. The problem with the 2nd Floor map is the complicated layout of the area and my map made it look far less complex. For example, each of those ovals has 6 computer workstations. Out of 72 computers, there is only one machine that has Kurzweil. I quickly added a few more details to the map, such as desks and rooms to make it easier to read.

The take-away from my task was that it’s important to test users who have different kinds of knowledge about their surroundings. While I understand these maps are very rudimentary, my usability testing helped improve the maps for a specific audience. When you don’t have much time to test a final product, finding two individuals from the office works very well.

Kachina Chapter Secretary

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Note: This is an on-going series about my participation in the New Mexico Kachina Chapter.

Allow me to introduce myself; I have been the Secretary for the STC New Mexico Kachina Chapter for nearly a year and it has been a great experience. I’ve learned a lot and I want to kick off my series about my involvement with my local chapter.

Last year in June I contacted Larry Bonura, chapter president (2010), and asked him what I could do to participate in the New Mexico Kachina Chapter. I heard about the organization through my involvement with the New Mexico Trinitite Student Chapter at my alma mater, New Mexico Tech. At the student level, I participated as the Treasurer and mostly organized and managed the 2009 STC Summit trip to Atlanta.

Larry suggested that I could be the Secretary for the chapter and that’s where it began.

I was happy to volunteer during the summer while I was seeking employment. Additionally my skills would contribute to the organization in a positive way. If I practice TC at work, I should donate my time and skills for the Chapter as well.

Throughout the summer and fall, we had meetings and participated in chapter activities. We had some great discussion and this avenue would open up new technical communication opportunities for me and others.

When I became Chapter Secretary, I mentioned some of my recent web work and naturally I gravitated toward assisting with the website since there was no current webmaster. It was maintained by Helen Moody, past Chapter President  (2009) and long-time Kachina Chapter leader and STC member. I did some work to migrate information from the static HTML website to the dynamic WordPress site. It is currently not done but in a state of progress that will take a few more months to complete. So far it’s easier to update a WordPress website instead of a static website which required software that not everyone has access to.

After one year of acting as Chapter Secretary, I look forward to another year of contributing to the technical communication community.