Writing

Bah, my heads all of a muddle at the moment, trying to write songs, but busy sorting all sorts out and can't quite get anything out, lots of bits and pieces of ideas...

Applecore<br>Broken Door<br>Commercial crap<br>Cat flap<br>High crime<br>Sign of the times<br>Night clubs<br>Seedy pubs<br>Rubbish bin<br>Collecting tin<br>Bus stop<br>Bent cop<br>Run down school<br>Drunken fool<br>Paedophile<br>Give us a smile<br>Traffic jam<br>Bang bang<br>Road work<br>Office jerk<br>Broken homes<br>Millennium dome<br>Drug dealer<br>Office cleaner<br>Broken bottle<br>Full throttle<br>Boarded up shops<br>Office blocks<br>Social life<br>Beaten up wife<br>Dodgy bloke<br>Being broke<br>Sick on the ground<br>Too much sound<br>Political shit<br>Hypocrite<br><br>City life, don't you just love it<br>

<p align="left">The speaker line ups and topics keep getting better for the Melbourne geek nights and tonight is no expection.<p align="left"><strong>Ophelie Lechat from Flippa talking about &quot;Tackling the scary content marketing beast&quot;</strong><br />I&#39;ve been doing some of this myself recently, so it was interesting to hear some more in depth on te topic from a commercial perpective, here&rsquo;s what I got out of the session:<ul><li>Content isn&rsquo;t just a blog</li><li>Have editorial calendars</li><li>Content strategy and marketing are best friends as the discipline helps attract seo and web traffic, this in turn reduces demand on customer support and partnerships. good for engagement.</li><li>Assess what content you already have. If it&#39;s not content it may be existing skills or assets.</li><li>Writing for your site can be empowering for team members</li><li>Don&rsquo;t be afraid of ghost and hired writers.</li><li>Decide what will you talk about and don&#39;t just talk to and about yourself. Identify what others don&#39;t do or do badly.</li><li>ebooks of collections of posts are a great marketing idea.</li><li>What to write about - questions that need answering, searches on your site. What conversations are people having elsewhere? If you get stuck, write an outline first.</li><li>Keep your content as short as possible, focus, end with engagement, what do users/readers want?</li></ul>

<p class="p1">I feel slightly cheeky writing much about the event as I didn&rsquo;t really end up doing very much and felt somewhat humbled and embarrassed by the other attendees.<p class="p1">Anyway, to start at the beginning.<p class="p1">HealthHack 2013 was a weekend hackfest solving problems that medical researchers face. HealthHack brought together medical researchers, bioinformaticians, software developers, data analysts, data visualisers and designers. Together, they created new software tools to analyse, visualise and communicate data.<p class="p1">Organised by a great team in a very welcoming atmosphere it was a surprisingly well attended event considering the niche topic.&nbsp;Read about the weekend and the winners here - <span class="s2"><a href="https://healthhackmelb.com">healthhackmelb.com</a><p class="p1">I turned up on Friday night and enjoyed being very well fed and watered and finally got to meet <a href="https://twitter.com/FCTweedie"><span class="s2">@FCTweedie</a> in the flesh after much mutual twitter stalking.<p class="p1">I listened to the problem statements and must admit it was all a little over my head. I come from a technical background and despite having studied &lsquo;proper programming&rsquo; at University it has been a very long time since I really did any and I realise my web work is very light really. Also the technical scientific nature of the problems was a little out of my depth, I vaguely understand what things like DNA are, but when it comes to reporting, analysing and visualising them, way out of my comfort zone.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Still, I found one talk spoke to me at a level I could understand, which was about visualising the quality of academic papers on particular subjects. Working a lot within content management systems, this seemed like an ideal fit to my skills, so I joined the team. However, mixing with a bunch of far superior programmers to me, it was immediately obvious that they had far more complex (and probably more appropriate) solutions in mind and I was a little lost again&hellip;<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I meandered around for a bit watching what people where up to and went to see if the organisers needed any help, they didn&rsquo;t, but were incredibly nice to me about everything and we had a very interesting chat about Hack events in general, but I think that&rsquo;s a discussion for another blog post.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Great stuff and congratulations to all involved.

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">A few weeks ago I quit my job, I&rsquo;d been there for two years but it was no longer right for me anymore.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I&rsquo;m not one to rest on my laurels, so what&rsquo;s next? After a process of figuring out who I am and what I want to do, quite a lot is on the horizon, allow me to introduce you to some of the potentials&hellip;<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>Wrapping up my involvement in Green Renters</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">This has been something that Cate and I have been trying to do for a while and we realised it needed more focussed work than we initially thought and we&rsquo;re weighing up quite what shape this will take, if you&rsquo;re interested in knowing more about that, <a href="https://greenrenters.org/news/time-new-lease" target="_blank">read this blog post</a>.<p class="p1"><strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Starting a new cooperative organisation</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The shape that this will (possibly) completely take is yet to be decided, but I&rsquo;m resurrecting and changing an old tag line from my past and starting a new Community development and Technology co-operative business called &ldquo;Large Gregarious Mammal&rdquo;, if you&rsquo;re interested in that or want in, <a href="https://largegregariousmammal.com/content/introducing-large-gregarious-mammal#overlay-context=" target="_blank">see this blog post</a>.<p class="p1"><strong style="line-height: 1.538em;">Writing more</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Wether it be on the very blog or on other more established publications, I want to write more&hellip; About technology, ideas, other people&rsquo;s ideas and&hellip; My book&hellip;<p class="p1"><strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Lean Agile nonprofit</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I&rsquo;ve mentioned this before, but I&rsquo;m stepping up working on my timely and needed (at this time) volume (but also consultancy, blog etc&hellip;) on applying lean and agile methodology to the non profit world. <a href="https://theleanagilenonprofit.com/" target="_blank">Follow those exploits here</a>.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>Tools for Changemakers</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Inspired by the reception from my sessions as part of the Chagnemakers Festival I have decided to turn it into an ongoing project, not only more such sessions, but also a website resource that will weigh up and review tools suitable for Changemakers.<br /><a href="https://toolsforchangemakers.com" target="_blank">toolsforchangemakers.com</a><p class="p1">Or I might just get a job&hellip;

First up, I find it strange how different sectors describe the same things with different names and have the same problems. It&#39;s simultaneously refreshing and depressing that small and large organisations have exactly the same problems with their projects.

Yesterday I came up with the most phenomenal idea of how to get my writing workflow, ideas for ODTWE and tech stack in ‘perfect’ combination. Well, in theory (unsurprisingly).

This week has been a fervent flurry of activity as I prepare for <a href="/its-all-change-again" target="_blank">starting my new job next week</a>.

As a (very) frequent writer and editor I often find myself writing and correcting the same words over and over again. Or in preparation for publishing I have to repeatedly undertake the same steps, such as adding short codes or formatting links.

I spent a long time researching, trying and tweaking text editors. As a cross-platform developer and technical writer (mostly writer these days) I work with different programming languages, document formats and want an editor with particular features, but that is also easy on the eye. Ideally I wanted all the functionality I was looking for in one application, not split between 5.

When you've spent a lot of time working on the latest great project, library, service or platform you generally would like people to use it. Whether people find out about you from a presentation, the media, internet search or word of mouth, what's the first aspect of your project that people usually encounter?

I recently created a package for the Atom text editor that exports your markdown files to Medium. Find out how I wrote it and how you can help me improve it.

If you've wanted a spell checker or autocorrect that simply does more, check out how this tool is bein used to check for tense and syle as well.

Ten days ago Kevin Small posted Visualizing Bitcoin Transactions in 3D and Virtual Reality, making it the 500th post submitted to Kauri. We thought this was a great time to recap and recount some of our and your favorite posts from the past year since Kauri began.

Documentation structure applies to your documentation as a whole, and to each page. Let's start at the top and work down.

What's one of the first things you look at when you look at using a new project?

I appreciate that not everyone who writes documentation is a native English speaker, or even if they are, may not understand the best way to write clearly and concisely. Many native English speakers had our last grammar lesson more than 20 years ago, and have learnt the tips and tricks we now use as professional writers recently. There are three important things to remember to justify the time and effort of making your writing more understandable:

For Nanowrimo (national novel writing month) 2021 I continued my novel from last year. To remind anyone who hasn’t followed my sparse updates on the novel, the novel is a speculative fiction set after a global zombie and human conflict where the two (let’s call them) species coexist in a tense harmony. For Nanowrimo this year, I set myself two targets.

How many words do you write every day? Think about it. Every time you send an email, post in Slack, or comment on an Instagram post. Oh, you thought I would mention those wondrous words you pour into your latest novel, blog post, marketing copy, or script?

Who do you think reads most of your technical writing? Customers? Potential customers?

Much like "googling" has become a generic term for searching, Grammarly has become almost synonymous with a general grammar and style checker, outside of those provided by tools like Word or Google Docs. I have used the pro version for several years, and while its advice is not always correct and inconsistent, it's generally a good aid in giving ideas and pointers for writing. However, every year, that subscription comes up for renewal, and I start thinking about alternatives and features I'd like to have that Grammarly doesn't offer. In this post, I look at the disappointingly few alternatives that exist.