YES! It’s completely true! We still have a few copies of the STC Atlanta cookbook Fixin’ to Eat: Some South for Your Mouth for sale. They are $12, and we’ll ship them to you for free.

Featured Recipes

Check out some of the great recipes from this cookbook. Order your copy and try them today!

Metadata Minestrone Soup (it’s all about the content), submitted by Mirhonda “Marmalade” Studevant. The soup is chock full of various vegetables, tomatoes, spinach  and beans for a delightful winter meal. Serve the soup with crusty bread and share with crusty technical communicators.

Sweet Potato WIKI, a place where your taste buds can collaborate. This yummy dish, submitted by Judy Glick-Smith, combines mashed sweet potatoes with flavor enhancing ingredients to bring out the sweet in sweet potatoes. The casserole is topped with nuts and brown sugar to complete the definition. Much too fancy to call ‘em “yams!”

Search and Replace Chili has a little extra white space thrown in. While the dish starts with Wick Fowler’s 2-Alarm Chili Mix, you soon find that you search and replace the package instructions  with such items as chicken for the ground beef, great northern beans for more white space and Poblamo chili for punctuation. Mike Hughes submitted this recipe and tells us the dish looks awful, tastes good; just the opposite of lipstick on a pig.

Oreo Balls is our featured recipe and is perfect for technical writers juggling many balls at work. This yummy concoction, submitted by Claudia Ludlow, is a rich, chocolately treat for your mouth with the full taste of Double Stuffed Oreos. Crushed Oreos are augmented with cream cheese and more chocolate and rolled into balls. These are also good for style enforcers who see everything in black and white.

For our June meeting, we’re hosting Arroxane Eber, president of the Lone Star chapter, for an engaging presentation on how to keep cool during difficult moments in the workplace and to use our communication skills to defuse tension.

Note: We will hold our annual business meeting from 6:30-6:45.

Details

Thursday, June 3 (note the event is on a Thursday this month)

6:30-8:00
Free for members; $10 for non-members
Mirant,1155 Perimeter Center West, Atlanta, GA 30338
Parking is free. You can park in the lot or the garage.
RSVP for this event

Photo credit: Nhan Khuong

Dear STC Colleagues,

This survey asks about your experiences collaborating with others in the workplace. You will be asked about the different tools you may use, about how often you use these tools, and about whether these tools improve your collaboration.

You can choose not to participate in this research survey. You may also choose not to answer particular questions. Participation is voluntary, and any information you provide is anonymous. No personal information about participants is collected. By clicking START SURVEY NOW, you can begin the process. Feel free to ask any of your workplace colleagues who engage in collaborative activities to complete the survey as well.

Please help Dr. Burnett out by completing the survey and forwarding it on to others where you work.

Every year, the Atlanta Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication awards a scholarship to a junior or senior college student who is pursuing a career in technical communication. We’re now accepting applications for this year’s David C. Leonard scholarship.

If you or someone else you know is interested, you can find out more information on the Scholarship page. Applications will be accepted through March 31, 2010.

Photo credit: Mays Business School

She notes:

The purpose of the review is to identify barriers on the page that would prevent someone who has a disability�or who is using an assistive technology�from using or understanding the content on the web page.

Because the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) are pretty extensive, and because there�s no tool that will automatically identify all the accessibility barriers in a web page, I use a variety of tools to help me figure out where the barriers are and what�s causing them.

The tools Angela references are all useful for assessing accessibility for technical documents, as well (though as she points out, these tools are poor substitute for testing your documents with users with disabilities).

Read more on AngelaColter.com

You are looking for a challenging position in a growing, modern company with an employee-centered approach. You would like to work in a company who rewards staff for performance coupled with passion and innovative thinking, and who makes a point of creating a casual and positive work atmosphere where employees can be productive.

Large company involved with many different products and services worldwide. Position is located in Alpharetta, GA. This opportunity may become a temp to hire position. Responsibilities Coordinating media relations activities On an as needed basis, the position will provide support and promotion of new business wins, press events…

Develop and distribute instructional, reference, and marketing material for a variety of outputs, including print, help, Web, and CD. This material includes original text, graphics, and illustrations created with various kinds of desktop software, such as word processors, web authoring tools, and graphic layout applications.

There is no method within Author-it for tracking down these duplicate file names (the HTML file name field is not searchable).

However, if you’re using SQL server, you can create an Excel spreadsheet that can help track down duplicates when the dreaded blank topic files appear.

These instructions are for Excel 2003. I’m sure it can be done for other versions, but I haven’t done it.

1. Open Excel.
2. From the menu bar, select Data > Import External Data > New Database Query. The Choose Data Source dialog appears.
   1. On the databases tab, select sqlserver, and then click OK. The SQL Server Login dialog appears.
   2. In Server, enter or select the SQL Server that is used by Author-it. This should take the form of <host name>\<database name> or <IP address>\<database name>. For example, 192.168.3.35\authorit.
   3. Select the appropriate authentication method for your database. If you are uncertain, select Use Trusted Connection first. If that fails and you do not know the database Login ID and password, contact your SQL administrator.
3. Click Next. The Choose Columns page of the Query Wizard appears.
4. Under Available tables and columns, expand TOPIC_OBJT.
5. Select the OBJT_ID, HEADING, H_CONTEXT_ID, and HT_FILENAME columns and add them to your query by clicking the > button. After each column has been added, click Next. The Filter Data page of the Query Wizard appears.
6. Click Next. The Sort Order page of the Query Wizard appears.
7. Click Next. The Finish page of the Query Wizard appears.
8. Select Return Data to Microsoft Office Excel, and then click Finish. The Import Data dialog appears.
9. Select where you want to put the imported data, and then click OK. The data is imported and inserted into Excel.
10. From the menu bar, select Data > Filter > AutoFilter. A sorter is added to the top of each column in the spreadsheet.

To find all topics using a duplicate file name, click the down arrow in the HT_FILENAME column header and select the name of the file that is publishing as a blank page. The list updates to show ever topic that has that same file name.

Once you create this spreadsheet, you can save it and reuse it every time you encounter a blank topic from duplicated file names. Data should update automatically, but I usually select Data > Refresh Data just to be sure.

This is completely safe. You can import the data into Excel from SQL, but you cannot use this method to modify the data in SQL. It’s one-way, so very useful and safe for reporting.