(photo by solutiongrove.net)

It's my job as a technical writer to come up with a good documentation or help section of the application our company is developing.  Two resources from the .LRN Community have given me insights on Help Systems:  LMS Help Sections – Comparison and Introduction to Embedded Help and Examples for .LRN.

Most users don’t use the help section or, at least, avoid online help systems because It’s too much effort on the part of the user and the time invested isn’t returned with good results. To add to that switching back and forth between the application and the help system poses difficulty to the user.  Their attention is split between the help system and the application itself.  Thus, users are dissatisfied with the help systems. 

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(photo by crr29061)

Are you looking for polls that can be embedded into your page? One of our clients wanted to have polls embedded into their Web site.  So I had the chance to search the Internet for free embeddable poll softwares and, I must say, there are a lot. My list was quite long at the end of my search but evaluating and reviewing the features of the softwares that I found cut my long list. I ended up with 4 choices. Let me refer to them for now as the Magic Four.

• Wufoo
• Polldaddy
• Questionform
• Vizu

The Magic Four offer almost the same features and capabilities. I signed up for free accounts and tried them myself. Using any of them, surveys and polls are quite easy to create. You don't need to have programmer knowledge and skills to come up with one. Just drag and drop, type in your questions and choices, and click. You can also choose the theme or skin of your choice. You may even customize your own theme so your polls will have a look that matches you page. You may opt for a single choice or multiple choice polls. The polls can be embedded into your Web site, blog, emails, and what have you. This answers the need of our client. All you have to do is copy the code, which will be given at the end of your survey/poll creation, paste it into your Web page editor, and voila! Your poll is embedded into your site. Another feature is the survey or poll analysis. Voters can see the poll results, if the poll is made public by the author. Also, you, as the author, can export  your data in csv, xml, or excel. Vizu and Polldaddy allows you to insert photos and videos into your polls. This adds more fun to your polls.

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Part of our end-user support is to provide helpful tips and documentation matched with training videos and demos to assist clients in their daily applications. Our wiki and other content creation tools uses Xinha, a powerful What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor. 

Our latest how to is on editing a table in Xinha. Just like in any other application, creating and editing tables should be quite easy. In Xinha, editing tables is similar to that in windows. This short demo should be able to guide you.

And to provide you with more reference on other related topics, I've organized, in one reference page, all of our company's written documentation and video demos on how to use Xinha and XoWiki. This page contains links to the following topics:

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(photo by davidcrow)

Whatever field you are in, good communication is one of the keys that make work easier. In search for better communication, one of our colleagues came across the Jing program and shared about it to the rest of the group. I was tasked to look into Jing and see what it can do for the company.

As I tried to learn how to use the Jing program, I read through a few of the comments and blogs written by some users who participated in the Jing Project by providing their feedbacks which in turn became useful to the design and development team of Jing. The comments and feedback paved the way to a newer and better version of Jing. My learning experience with Jing was quite okay, I must say. Some things I found advantageous and useful while others, just about average.

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(photo by Vicki's Pics)

In this day and age, people write blogs for many reasons: one, to make money out of it; two, to gain popularity; three, to share their thoughts and ideas about what interests them; four, to tell their story, like what you do in a personal journal; or five, as a hobby, to simply destress themselves by expressing their hearts out.

It's interesting the way different people write about different things on the Web. Coming across some very insightful blogs and comments, I realized blogging can also be a way to learn and connect with people. I'm not a blogger myself, though I used to have my personal journal in my teenage years, but learning about some blogging tips, I thought it can be interesting if you only put your heart into it.

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