Shanghai Tech Writer

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series NI Style GuideA very long time ago, I started a series about NI Style Guide, our reference guide to writing documentation at National Instruments. I wrote two posts and never thought about the series again. I’m not big into style and I’m certainly not a [...]

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Technical Writing in Shanghai/ChinaContinuing from an earlier post, English is everybody’s second or third language in China. English is taught in schools as early as kindergarten (in the big cities) but fully integrated into the curriculum by middle school. By high school, the English curriculum [...]

From DailyBlogTips, I read about this new site called MyBlogValue that lets you discover the value of your blog. The site asks 19 questions about your blog and calculates your blog’s worth. Questions include how often you blog, how many visitors you have per month, how many subscribers you have, how you perform on search [...]

One of the featured articles in our internal technical communication newsletter this month is about the technical writers working on NI TestStand.
When asked how they work with their subject matter experts, or SMEs, this is what they said:
“We love our developers! They often let us know how much they appreciate our work, and they respect [...]

Several months ago, I started a series about workspace configurations, following Tom’s post on his top 10 workspace configurations. His number one setup was having a dual-monitor setup. I was envious because I wanted a dual-monitor setup too. Many developers at work have this setup but not any of the technical writers.
Today, I decided to [...]

Tom Johnson at I’d Rather Be Writing started a new social bookmarking site called WriterRiver.com for technical communicators. Just like Digg, anyone can submit interesting articles on technical communication and share with others. Users can vote articles they like so that popular articles are more visible. Currently, there aren’t that many registered users and articles [...]

After waiting for more than three years, I finally got the #1 item on my wishlist — the Super 500 Vita-Mix. Vita-Mix is the Ferrari of all blenders. I’ve been lusting after this machine for a very long time but haven’t been able to find it anywhere in China until recently. Due to the voltage [...]

According to an article by Technology Review, China is the worst offender of all the internet spammers in the world. Brazil, Turkey, and the U.S. follow in the ranks.
In the article, research showed that $525.7 million was lost due to internet fraud in the U.S. How much more is lost due to business productivity and [...]

This entry is part 5 of 6 in the series Picasa Photo TemplatesCool Fullscreen is a flash-based template, originally created by Chris Agisotis, but turned into a Picasa template by Paul van Roekel. You can generate this slideshow using Picasa and the Cool FullScreen Picasa template.

Download
You can download the template here.
Review

Criteria
Review
Score

Design
From first glance, [...]

This entry is part 3 of 6 in the series Picasa Photo TemplatesStop Design is an adaptation of the original Bowman’s Movable Type template. You can generate this slideshow using Picasa and the Picasa template.

Download
 You can download the template here.
Review

Criteria
Review
Score

Design
This is a simple and clean design, but nothing fancy.
4

Loading speed
The default view loads immediately because [...]

This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series Picasa Photo TemplatesAutoViewer is created by Airtight Interactive. This is a simple flash slideshow that you can generate using Picasa and the AutoViewer Picasa template. The free version has limited custom-features, but the AutoViewer Pro ($45USD) allows you to customize everything.

Download
You can download the template [...]

This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series Picasa Photo TemplatesPicasa is a great photo organizer application, but what happens after you upload photos from your camera to Picasa? I’ve been searching and looking for a good way to share photos with family/friends as well as displaying them on my websites/blogs. Personally, I don’t like Flickr because Flickr doesn’t [...]

This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Picasa Photo TemplatesPicasa is one of my favorite software because it is easy to organize photos and create slideshows. Several months ago, I wrote a post on my personal blog about flash templates I use to create cool photo slideshows.
Recently, I discovered Paul van Roekel’s [...]

Warning: Obsessing over SEO ranking is a side effect of entering the world of blogging.
Something happened to Shanghai Tech Writer last week and I can’t figure out what the problem is! For some reason, all the posts for this blog aren’t being indexed by Google anymore. I’m not sure if it’s because Google changed the [...]

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Working on a Documentation ProjectAccording to Wikipedia:
A Subject Matter Expert (SME) is a person who is an expert in a particular area. In software engineering environments, the term is used to describe professionals with expertise in the field of application but without technical project knowledge.
Technical [...]