Mixture Posture

I do not long for the days when I used Confluence on a daily basis at Pearson. I am happy using RoboHelp at work as I work on Knowledge Management & Disaster Recovery documentation.

Hi Keith,

I haven't had to create a spreadsheet in Confluence, so can't answer that specific question.

But in terms of a bit of advice based on a couple years of experience maintaining content on a Confluence site with thousands of pages of content:

   1. If you have a single hierarchical arrangement in which you wish to
   present the topics you create, just organise them in the order you wish in
   the page tree, and you're good to go! If you wish to re-use a single topic
   in multiple different locations in the tree, a separate folder of
   topics-for-inclusion + the Include Page macro to include a shared topic in
   a particular page in the tree seems to do the trick quite nicely. It's not
   quite the same as a full-on authoring system with re-usable content blocks,
   but you can fake it acceptably using that technique.

   2. ** Consider your strategy for search early **. Search is one of the
   weak points of using Confluence as a documentation presentation platform.
   You can mitigate this by using naming conventions for topics that include
   terms users can put in searches, using labels, and even putting information
   in different spaces associated with different types of information since
   search can easily specify the space to search. Because clicking on a search
   result does not advance the displayed page to the location of the search
   string on the page (or highlight the search string on the page) when it is
   opened, we learned quickly that users prefer smaller topics if they plan to
   locate content using search more often than using a TOC or the page
   hierarchy -- because there's less of a document for them to page around
   looking for the content they require.

   3. ** Consider your strategy for versioning early **. You can do this by
   hand, using separate spaces for different versions, so that users can
   search for docs for different versions of a product by specifying the space
   associated with the desired product version -- this allows pages to have
   the same title across versions. Advantage: You can easily clone the space's
   content to a new space for a new version of the docs. Or you can do this by
   hand, with all documentation in the same space -- which requires you to put
   the version at the end of each title so that multiple versions of a
   document can exist in the same space. Advantage: It pleases an admin who
   sees a separate space for each version to be an excessive use of Confluence
   spaces, at the cost of making it a bit of a nuisance to create a new doc
   set for a new version of the product, for any pages that are not
   automatically generated an uploaded with a version-unique title. (No more
   will be said about that.) Or you can try out Scroll Versions and see if it
   meets your requirements.

   4. If you use Scroll Versions to manage across versions (it's not bad,
   depending on what you want to do, but it's not glitch-free either), beware
   that at least as of a year ago -- and probably still today -- you cannot
   post pages using the REST API if you want those pages to be managed by
   Scroll Versions. We require this for some of our automated documentation
   production -- many of our collection TOCs and individual reference pages
   are generated using local table-driven tools and XSLs that create and post
   Confluence-internal-schema-compliant XML -- so Scroll Versions was out.

   5. Plug-ins are your friend. As Sharon Metzger pointed out, they are
   variable in quality, and some are very much worth the money.

   6. Beware moving and copying pages with embedded images that were first
   added by cut and paste. It seems to be better to explicitly insert images
   file-by-file if you ever plan to move pages around later. (This may only be
   an issue across spaces or may be an issue across permission boundaries.
   Once we determined explicit inserts fixed it, we just proceeded with that
   as process without investigating further.)

   7. Know that the Confluence Server editor is glitchy, but usually not
   fatally so. Confluence Cloud may have similar issues but I haven't put the
   hours into it that I've put into Server. If you are in the editor 6-8+
   hours a day and your topics tend to be on the longer, multi-page side,
   remember this: Control-Z will rescue you from all manner of scary ills!
   Occasionally -- 5-10 times a week for me -- you might be copying and
   pasting around a document, or attempting to apply a heading style, or doing
   something else other than simply typing in the editor, and find that your
   whole document suddenly renders in a particular style, the entire body of
   your document disappears, a cell in your table now contains what used to be
   the entire next row of the table, etc. When this happens, do not panic,
   just undo. Although Confluence sometimes gets the "do" part wrong, it
   RARELY gets the "undo" part wrong.

   8. If you want to buy a third-party theme setup plug-in, beware that
   they can interact poorly with other third-party plug-ins and Confluence
   itself. A theming package my employer uses causes me to constantly get
   "Cannot save page" messages from intermediate auto-saves during editing or
   for final updates -- even though Confluence does seem to save the page.
   Atlassian and the theme plug-in vendor are playing the "No, it's them!"
   game at each other; it's been an issue for most of a year.

   9. Sharepoint tends toward the over-designed end of things. Confluence
   tends toward the under-designed end. Neither are built to be full-featured
   content management systems, just easy-to-use web-publishing systems for the
   masses. The more you use Confluence, the more you will wish it can do, that
   it can't do, and the more you will understand that when they bolted a
   WYSIWYG editor on top of their product's existing non-WYSIWYG wiki editor,
   the end result works like a WYSIWYG editor bolted on after the fact. It is
   a relatively simplistic tool whose power derives from the ability to create
   plug-ins to do things that it, itself, cannot do. Welcome to the club.

   10. If you have a need to export content to Word docs, the Word export
   plug-in seems to produce acceptable output. It's not as well-formatted as a
   document created from scratch in Word would be, but it's OK.

Kind regards,

Helen.

Marketing Crap

Upon returning to work after a 10 day journey to New York City, I began the laborious task of weeding through my emails. This one made me chuckle:

To read the "marketing crap" for yourself and generate your own opinion, go here: https://clickhelp.co/clickhelp-technical-writing-blog/how-to-write-a-user-manual/

To read the referenced page, go here: https://clickhelp.co/software-documentation-tool/user-manual/context-help.html

When will Load no Longer be a Loaded Topic?

Saturday, May 12, 2018

Protest

Cate Blanchett Led A Protest Of 82 Women In Film On The Cannes Red Carpet

Friday, May 11, 2018

Don't Live with Regret but....

I regret not going to the FF show when I watch this video.

Paradiddles!

Vinniec Colaiuta is a BEAST on the drums!

Kimmel Belongs on MSNBC

Jimmy Kimmel: ‘The One Time Trump Should Have Pulled Out, We Ended Up With Donald Jr’

I have written about the mistake ex-band members make. Someone leaves a band and is then asked about the band. Instead of dodging the question, the ex-band member states an opinion and sites like blabbermouth.net turn it into a story. KISS has done this and here is a video with insults that should have been kept private.

https://youtu.be/ImLBgwkGlOA

Thursday, May 10, 2018

Demo to Finish

https://youtu.be/tpq5pHQvTSw

Jane's Diary

https://youtu.be/CCyHIaRxVgY

Friday, May 4, 2018

It

Iowa Governor Signs Nation’s Strictest Abortion Ban Into Law Planned Parenthood and the ACLU plan to challenge the “fetal heartbeat” bill, which would effectively ban abortions at six weeks of pregnancy.

Celebrate the Politics of Star Wars

It was 1 year, 3 weeks ago when today, May 4, 2018, seemed like a lifetime away. Embedding a video about Avengers: Infinity War, which is being released today - http://prhmusic.blogspot.com/2017/04/predicting-death.html - didn't make it easier to be patient. And while much of the world continues to celebrate the release of the third Avengers movie - Infinity War - this is a link to an article that was published a year ago all about the politics of Star Wars: Star Wars Is More Political Than You Think. The next Star Wars movie - Solo: A Star Wars Story - is being released on 5/25/18 - a short 3 weeks away!

Speaking of Star Wars, if I didn't have other plans today, I would go see Naomi / Faces Turned Ashen / Running in Place in Cedar Rapids:

Thursday, May 3, 2018

I'm Hopeful

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/michael-cohen-wiretapped_us_5aeb40f0e4b0ab5c3d631ca3

Are PM & M REALLY Playing Both Weekends of ACLMF?!?

I wanted to know whether Metallica plays the first weekend or the second weekend so I slid the filter to WK1. I saw this:

Then I slid the filter to WK2. I saw this:

There is something not working in the HTML, the CSS, or the JavaScript on this site: https://www.aclfestival.com/lineup/interactive-lineup/

Iowa City = Cedar Rapids

I used both the Awesome jobs that I won't apply for and the Crappy jobs that I won't apply for because I've seen this ad for a Proposal Writer at Geonetric several times - probably should have tracked how many times.

My honest-to-God first impulse today is that a woman who was in my department at Pearson was a fine Proposal Writer and she lives in Cedar Rapids. Her husband works in Czech Village, which is close to where Geonetric is located. For her, I am thinking this would be an awesome job; for me, I am thinking this would be a crappy job since I'm happy where I work as a technical writer, focused on disaster recovery documentation and Knowledge Management.

Teasing Me!

I wanted to purge my Google Photos so I would not have to deal with taking too many pictures while I am ... away. Thus, I selected 2205 items:

Only to then be greeted with this:

I really wish that when I had selected more than 500 items that a popup would have said, "If you are selecting items to download, 500 items is the most that can be downloaded at one time" instead of popping up the message after I have selected 2205 items.

One of my guiding principles at work as a technical writer is to find not only the 'main' use cases but to also find the 'fringe' use cases. Perhaps selecting 2205 items to be downloaded is a 'fringe' use case?

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Waiting

Gifted Metal Airline Pilot Passes

http://www.metalsucks.net/2018/05/01/former-forbidden-nevermore-guitarist-tim-calvert-has-passed-away-at-age-52/

Loved Forbidden's Twisted Into Form release...

I'd Vote in the Election

Get The Fainting Couch! Brian Kemp's Teen Shotgun Hits The National Bulleye

Here are the lyrics to that tune:

Shake it up is all that we know
Using the bodies up as we go
I'm waking up to fantasy
The shades all around aren't the colors we used to see
Broken ice still melts in the sun
And times that are broken can often be one again
We're soul alone
And soul really matters to me
Take a look around
You're out of touch
I'm out of time
But I'm out of my head when you're not around
You're out of touch
I'm out of time (time)
But I'm out of my head when you're not around
Oh oh oh oh oh oh
Reaching out for something to hold
Looking for a love where the climate is cold
Manic moves and drowsy dreams
Or living in the middle between the two extremes
Smoking guns hot to the touch
Would cool down if we didn't use them so much, yeah
We're soul alone
And soul really matters to me
Too much
You're out of touch
I'm out of time
But I'm out of my head when you're not around
You're out of touch
I'm out of time
But I'm out of my head when you're not around
Oh oh oh oh oh oh
Oh oh oh oh oh oh
You're out of touch
I'm out of time
But I'm out of my head when you're not around
You're out of touch
I'm out of time
But I'm out of my head when you're not around
You're out of touch
Time
But I'm out of my head when you're not around
You're out of touch
I'm out of time
Not around
You're out of touch
I'm out of time

Mixture Posture

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Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Awaiting the New Tool Album Requires Patience

Catching Up with Monday Night Raw

40 Youtube URLs

2018 Tech Forum Information

Victories!

Some Confluence Resources