One of my regular clients is GdP Software, a Dutch-based company. They use me for localisation of web text and emails, and for documenting products such as watchFTP, a powerful tool for monitoring FTP directories and processing any uploaded files.

In explaining my work to a translator, Gert (my main contact) neatly summed up what I do…

So the original text was…

blah-dee-blah-dee-blah-blah-dee-blah-dee-blah-blah-dee-blah-dee-blah-bl a-dee-blah-dee-blah-blah-dee-blah-dee-blah-blah-dee-blah-dee-blah-blah- dee-blah-dee-blah-blah-dee-blah-dee-blah-blah-dee-blah-dee-blah-blah-di e-blah-dee-blah-blah-dee-blah-dee-blah-blah-dee-blah-dee-blah-blah-dee- blah-dee-blah-blah-dee-blah-dee-blah-blah-dee-blah-dee-blah-

After DD’s changes it is…

To do blah-dee-blahh:

1. Blah-dee-blah blah blah

2. Blah blah blah

(With several spelling errors corrected.)

He was of course, correct.

I’ll cheerfully admit that I don’t do anything special, but what I do do, I do very quickly indeed, and from the user’s point-of-view. This makes it more cost effective to use me, than to lock some poor coder in a room with a Help Authoring Tool – and I’ve yet to see a HAT that’s both user-friendly and powerful - and a copy of Technical Writing for Dummies.

EDIT: When I told Gert about  this blog post, he said I could quote him on the following:

Working with Documentation Doctor is a pleasure, he works quickly and for a reasonable fee. If you have any doubts or questions, feel free to contact me: gert at watchftp.com

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!

Today,  I built an 1/72 Scale “Crusader” tank with my son. “Yes, Daddy, but what was it for? Was it any good?” We paraded through to the computer room. A few moments on Wikipedia gave us a pretty good answer, and Youtube has footage of the under-gunned armoured fighting vehicle trundling around at a show.

A few years ago, we’d have had to make a special trip to the library or thumb through military bookseller catalogues for something on 1940s British tanks.

Maybe next year, all I’ll have to do is point my mobile at the barcode.

There, in my hand, will be archive footage… original blue prints… historical details… links to Museums… an invitation to enter a competition by uploading a photo of the finished  model… and links to other model kits and related books.

A few clicks and I’ll be happier, and perhaps a little poorer – can’t… resist… those… tank… books – and I won’t have even got up from the workbench.

It’s called Mobile Marketing, and it’s turning the world into a point-and-click environment.

The snag with Mobile Marketing is that it mixes the Internet with mobile devices and the real world. You have to be able to field and send text messages, put up special mobile-friendly websites (WAP pages), generate barcodes… all technical stuff, some of it quite complex.

Historically – in this context, that means perhaps “the day before yesterday” – the complexity was expensive. You had to be a big player or a gambler, because no excursion into new marketing channels is guaranteed to succeed.

Then, along came Moozey. They’ve automated the thing. You can sign up, design a campaign, activate it and analyse the results, all online. You don’t need to speak to a salesman or any other sort of rep.

They’ve not so much “cut out the middle man” as done away with consultants as well, reducing the whole thing to just another application, albeit one you use on the web. Better yet, they’ve hacked down the cost down to the point where you can afford to test the waters.

Products that hide their power behind a simple interface are always impressive, so I was very pleased to be asked to help optimize Moozey’s documentation, check the interface for consistency, and give the homepage a polish.

Working on software that’s undergoing development is never a “surgical strike”; you have to engage with the product and its purpose, and build up real working relationships with people you’ve never met, while at the same time not getting underfoot. I think Can, my contact at Moozey, feels the same: 

As a fresh startup developing Moozey, we were constantly in rush; trying to catch up with our countless project deadlines. We are glad that we have found a “co-worker” like Documentation Doctor. Most of the time he was even faster than us, completing his job always in a timely manner and in perfect quality. He is now virtually a part of our team and we hope he will continue to work on Moozey and our other future projects.

In truth, I had such fun messing about with the Moozey user account, I even considered replacing my old mobile with something that can actually read barcodes and display WAP pages…

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.

Until Tigran contacted me on behalf of RIATest - thanks to my rather eclectic educational background - when I thought of Armenia, I thought of its famous cataphracts, the ultra heavy cavalry who gave the Byzantines and others a run for their money at a time when many warriors in my neck of the woods still considered a coat of blue paint was appropriate battledress.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that many Armenians are nowadays happiest doing battle with complex programming challenges, in this case resulting in RIATest, a powerful tool for automatically testing Adobe Flex applications.

When I see products like this coming from formerly “obscure” corners of the world, I start to wonder how long it will be before we Brits start to feel like the naked guys daubed in woad again! The thing is, thanks to the Internet, physical distance is no longer a protection.

When I localised a press release and revised the documentation for RIATest, Tigran said:

You delivered good work which was essential for our website and documentation. The project went smoothly and I would not hesitate to recommend your services to others…

So, I can rest easy knowing that I’ve established cordial relations with our possible future overlords.

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…

In an online help, illustrations are usually just a waste of screen real estate - the user already has the interface open! 

However, a web version of the your online help, complete with screenshots, can act as a walk-through for potential customers, and aid SEO. I pride myself on providing this at no extra cost.

Here some examples of my work:

• Audio Zone Trigger
• Averina Code Signing Library
• Direct Access
• Webcam Zone Trigger

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…

As I found with my first project for them, VisualHint documentation is high on technical content. I was therefore particularly pleased that Nicolas Cadilhac felt able to come back with Smart PropertyGrid.Net 2.1:

For the update of the documentation of Smart PropertyGrid.Net 2.1, I logically chose to do business with Documentation Doctor again. The initial document had been very welcome by my customers so it was an obvious choice to reiterate the process with a company that works well and quickly.