Documentation Doctor

The Tragedy of the Commons - as any economist will tell you – is that people tend to use shared resources until they break. 

Shepherds slip an extra sheep onto the common land until it’s a desert, people leave their rubbish at picnic sites until nobody wants to eat there, drivers take shortcuts until the side-roads are clogged, sunbathers turn up their stereos until nobody can hear anything… and nowadays, “trolls” and “spammers” choke up Internet forums with the intellectual equivalent of white noise, or worse.

DeepTrawl is intended to stop this happening to your patch of the web.

It’s like having a killer robot to cull illicit sheep, sweep up the rubbish, keep people on the highway, and jam noisy stereos, that also checks the footpaths and updates the signs, and even returns lost wallets… OK, I’ve probably pushed the analogy a bit far.

In a nutshell, DeepTrawl sweeps for inappropriate forum postings, including credit card numbers, and checks your site for spelling, valid links, and optimal design. It even suggests possible improvements.

So, maybe a killer robot with a friendly geek inside.

You’ll understand, then, if I approached redrafting DeepTrawl’s documentation with a certain trepidation. However, despite being a powerful bit of kit, DeepTrawl is easy-to-use, with most of the important features no more than a click away.  The only real challenges were its very technical  capabilities, but a few iterations via email nailed these.

Jonathan Matthews of DeepTrawl seemed satisfied with resulting HTML help pages:

Thanks for the great work! This really helps the usability and  professionalism of DeepTrawl and I found the process very easy. If you ever want a recommendation just shout!

I hate PowerPoint. It can’t decide whether it’s a wizard or a WYSIWYG, and in falling between the two stools makes the sort of mess you’d rub a puppy’s nose in.

Of course, I do use PowerPoint. It’s one of those business tools you can’t avoid, not so much “Best of Breed”, rather “Least Bad of the Bad Bunch”. What I don’t get is people who use the thing for fun!

The worst crime of all is afflicting your friends with a PowerPoint presentation of your holiday snaps, with all those “special effects” that remind one of unemployed double-glazing salesmen in nylon trousers trying to learn how to sell used cars. A few minutes of that, and most sane people will be reaching for the nearest blunt object.

Slide Effect is designed to save you from being bludgeoned to death with your own holiday souvenirs. Instead of grudgingly slumming it as a slide machine, Slide Effect lets you turn your pictures into a high-energy audiovisual extravaganza, with synchronized music and cinematic special effects.

Though it won’t – unfortunately – kill PowerPoint, Slide Effect does come from that mountainous land formerly known for its professional soldiers. For this reason, Alain Bocherens, brought me in to localise his website and tune up the presentation of the application’s easy-to-use features.

Once he’d applied the changes, and well after he’d paid me, I checked over the website for typos, and things that didn’t actually work in context. I’ll admit I was partly motivated by fear of being skewered to death by Swiss pikemen, but it was worth it. Alain said:

If I need another documentation/proof reading task I won’t hesitate to work with you again.

This year, I’ve been a little busy. Too busy to update the blog.

Right now, however, I’ve got a brief window in which to write up a few of the projects that have kept me glued to the keyboard…

To a blues pianist like myself, railroads mean one thing: Boogie Woogie, and with that the romance of the engine chugging across the twilit landscape, a moving island of warmth  in the midst of nature at its wildest, or industry at its bleakest.

So, its no surprise that I found myself fascinated by the DRail model railway layout software.

Model railway enthusiasts not only understand the romance of rail, they seek to recreate it in their attics or back bedrooms. It’s not a cheap hobby – all that well-engineered track and rolling stock  costs money. It’s also a little complicated, since you’ve got to persuade the whole lot to fit together.

You could just buy track and tinker, or plan it all on paper. However, it’s easier – and potentially cheaper, to get yourself a software package to enable you to do your trial-and-error on-screen, and on the cheap.

I dread to think what David had to go through to build DRail. Functionality aside, it has a library of accurately modelled track for all major manufacturers – something of an achievement in itself.

David – as you might guess from his URL - is Dutch. He wanted to make sure that his English website read well to native speakers, so he gave me a shout and I did my thing. I was overjoyed when he mailed me to say:

“…since I put up the website that you edited, I doubled my conversions for the English/American market.”

He then threw his draft documentation my way. I gave it a Full Edit, and he liked the result:

“I’m very happy with your work. I think it gives the product as a whole a quality boost!”

So, post title aside, neither of us has the blues about this project…

Just sometimes a project lands on my desk and I get the feeling that I’m helping make a little IT history. The Averina Code Signing SDK was one of these:

Averina Code Signing Library provides an easy-to-use but powerful API for software publishers and application developers to programmatically sign and verify code files using Authenticode® technology. It also introduces Averina’s brand new technology, Universal Software Identification™, which provides improved authenticity for signed software products.

The mathematical underpinnings for this are frankly scary!

I delivered the documentation as both a self-contained .chm file, and HTML pages formatted to look like a traditional online help.

Fortunately my mathematically frayed nerves did not seem to affect the quality of my work. The client was kind enough to say:

You have a great talent to describe even the most technical subjects in a very simple and clear way. Our customers will definitely benefit from your contributions to our reference material. We are looking forward to work with you on our future projects.

Judge for yourself…