Thought for the hour

Now you must be wondering what happened to the Thought for the Day.

Time is precious---so one of my friends who is capable of even coming up with thoughts for the minute is now sharing his thoughts per hour.

Read Thought of the Hour for some interesting and inspirational thoughts. It serves you "A fresh thought every hour. No stale quotations".

The Story of Simplified English and More !!

One interesting resource I came across while researching on simplified/controlled english is the 112 page Simplified English: The New Language for International Business booklet published by Tedopres International. Do request for your copy of the booklet at http://www.simplifiedenglish.net.

Their Technical Illustrations: New Efficient Ways to Visualize Your Product booklet is also quite interesting and claims to talk about a concept called simplified illustrations.

Leveraging Indexes as Search Metadata

You have invested thousands of hours in developing indexes for your printed user manuals that are now posted online in HTML format but still find that the findability of content on your website is not up to expectations. Why not leverage the indexes (that were developed with findability of content as the primary criteria) to improve findability by writing the index information as search metadata in your HTML files?

Metadata Primer

For a primer on the role of metadata in technical writing, see my Metadata Primer presentation for the 2008 STC India Conference.