Shanghai Tech WriterTechnical Writing, Technology, Web2.0, Google, Shanghai, China

For the past few months, I’ve been using Notepad++ for all my HTML editing. I could have used any of the fancy commercial HTML editors if I wanted to, but I chose to use Notepad++ because it’s free, open-source, lightweight, easy to use, fast, and functional. The truth of the matter was that I didn’t want to have to learn a new tool like Adobe Dreamweaver. I also didn’t want to load my laptop with a bunch of applications like I had to at my last job. After 2 years at NI, my super fast computer became really slow because of the multiple versions of LabVIEW along with a bunch of other tools that I had to install for the job. Thank goodness for cloud computing at Google! I’ve been able to keep my laptop with minimal applications installed!

Anyway, back to HTML editing…

At NI, the technical writers used Adobe Macromedia Homesite for HTML editing, which I actually liked in part because that was what everybody used, but also because I got familiar with the tool. Unfortunately, that product has been discontinued. Otherwise, I would have requested a license and continued to use HomeSite here at Google, which by the way, is pretty relaxed about people using whatever tools we want to get the work done. Over the past few weeks, I’ve requested SnagIt for image capturing, Camtasia Studio for video recording, and Adobe Acrobat Pro for reviewing documents. But for HTML editing, I continued to use Notepad++.

One of the thing I really like about Notepad++ is that the editor doesn’t add a bunch of junk to my HTML. I like to keep my HTML clean. Unfortunately, it does have some limitations such as not being able to perform spell check and validate HTML. Notepad++ also doesn’t have a dual-pane code/browser view such that I can edit and view content simultaneously. I’d have to copy/paste content to another place such as Microsoft Word or our internal help content management system and run spell check. We also have another tool to validate HTML but I didn’t like because it was a black-box tool, meaning I upload an HTML doc and it spits out a cleaned up version. I like to actually see and validate every HTML error before fixing them.

So in the end, I broke down and requested a license for Adobe Dreamweaver because I’ve got to publish something like 130+ pages of online help this week and I want to make sure that I didn’t miss any typos or tags. I stopped by TechStop (Google’s amazing tech support center) this morning and the IT guy installed Dreamweaver on my laptop. It was as easy and fast as that!

I’ve never used Dreamweaver before so it took a while to navigate my way through the Dreamweaver interface. I don’t have time to learn all the features and functions right now, so I just looked for the spell check and HTML validation functions, then ran them on all my documents. I did in fact miss quite a number of typos and tags!!  Well, thank goodness I got to them before publishing!