Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Thanks to a link on one of my technical writing discussion lists, I came across this great article written in 2005: “Wikiphilia – The New Illness“.

Normally, I’d just skim such an article as my only real exposure to Wikis has been via Wikipedia (as a user and very occasional editor) and on the periphery of Wiki implementations in software support and development teams.

However, for my new client I am likely to be very involved in organising one team’s Wiki. From the looks of it, this Wiki was set up about a year or so ago and since then it’s become a bit of a dumping ground—’disorganised chaos’ would seem to be the best description, even though it’s an oxymoron. And it doesn’t seem as if people use it to its potential. For example, I haven’t noticed much in the way of collaborative discussion, which is what I thought this Wiki was meant to achieve.

I’m having a teleconference meeting about it on Thursday, so we’ll see what comes from that. Meantime, this article is a good read and I think it summarises very well the inherent problems with a Wiki that I’ve observed from a distance. I particularly liked these two paragraphs:

“And so the Wiki becomes a dumping ground for fragmented and incomplete files, textual sound-bites and aborted attempts to catalogue. And therein lies the second great failing of Wikis as information repositories – the absence of accessible organization and indexing. Although the basic Wiki functionality includes a simple search facility, there is little to no built in support for indexing or cross-referencing below the page level. There is no reading path made available to newcomers so that they might work from fundamental to more advanced material. Cogent explanation does not result from snippets of conversations; and exchanges of opinion need not be illustrative or informative.

Attempts to collate existing “content” into more substantial portions are easily defeated by the free-for-all editing of others, and further inhibited by the user group’s conflicting notions of the worth of the content and the best means for its explication. Just try and find something when the content, un-indexed, is constantly changing under foot.”

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I don’t know Amber Simmons, but I sure like the way she writes. A few days ago she published an article of hers—”Reviving Anorexic Web Writing“—on A List Apart.

She has some powerful things to say, although I think that ultimately it all comes down to “knowing your audience”. While she takes issue with the basic elements of good technical writing—chunked writing, bullet points, scan-able headings, and the like—I definitely believe they have a place. But they’re not applicable to every website out there.

She also has some valid points about writing text for use in ALT tags. And I particularly liked her anatomical analogy: “The content is the heart of the website. I can’t build you a body until you give me a heart.” I’ll have to use that sometime soon.

I’ve been working on a website for a client and had everything working using CSS except for some issues with the left column. This left column contained some navigational elements and I was using a background colour (I also tried an image) and a small right border to visually separate it from the main content area.

The problem was that no matter what settings I applied to the CSS, I couldn’t get the background colour (or image) and border to expand to the length of the content in the main section. I was able to set a min-height to force it to be at least a certain length for the shorter pages, but for the longer pages, the left column colour and border just stopped at the 600px minimum height I’d specified.

After some Googling and not finding anything (mostly because I didn’t know what terms to search for!), I called my friend Char in Boston… who happened to be in California at the time… and she helped me with some sites that she’s used. (She has had the problem too but couldn’t remember what quirky thing she had to do to solve it, and not being at home, she couldn’t access that info easily either.) After a bit more sleuthing using those sites as a starting point, I found the answer here: http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/onetruelayout/equalheight

As I’m only testing in Firefox and IE6 at the moment, I ignored some of the warnings about interesting things that happen in other browsers and went ahead. All I had to do was add about 4 lines to my CSS – and it worked!

Here’s what I added:

* added overflow: hidden; to my wrapper (#content) DIV
* added a new style definition as follows:
#MainContent, #ContentLeft
{
padding-bottom: 32767px;
margin-bottom: -32767px;
}
(My elements are called #MainContent and #ContentLeft).

I then tested in Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 6 – and it works in both for long and short pages!!! Now to download IE7 and test there… If that works too, then I have a winner!

Thanks Char!

Update: Yep, works in IE7 too!

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote an interesting blog post a week or so ago on the problem of offering too many choices, especially in 5-star rating systems where users will invariably pick “3” because it’s neutral. To quote from his excellent post:

Three is the little bear’s porridge, neither too hot nor too cold. Three is neutral—a safe place to hide. Even in the virtual world, where nothing more consequential is being asked than an opinion, many people would rather equivocate than commit.

But present these same users with a four-star spread and you leave them no cover. Two stars out of four is not neutral. Neither is three stars out of four. Any star rating they choose will reflect an actual opinion. There is no place to hide.

His post reminded me of Kathy Sierra’s “zone of mediocrity” where, to paraphrase Kathy, she said that any passion (love or hate) about a product/piece of software/website is always good – what you don’t want are users who feel nothing, who are in the zone of mediocrity. When most users are in that zone, you can pretty much kiss your product goodbye.

Some of Kathy’s posts on this subject:

• Be brave or go home
• Dilbert and the Zone of Mediocrity
• Death by Risk Aversion

It’s official. One of my clients – Fractal Technologies – has been acquired by Runge, a Brisbane-based global mining services company that offers mining consultancy and software. All the Fractal staff and contractors (including me) are now part of Runge. I’ve been contracting 2 days a week to Fractal for the past 2.5 years, and Runge are happy to have me continue under the same circumstances, and are OK with me working remotely for them. Contracts have all been signed.

No doubt my role in Runge will become more evident over time; for now, I’ll continue doing what I was doing at Fractal until told otherwise! I’m expecting to go to Perth next week to meet the Global Communications Manager, but there’s a possibility that I may have to go to Brisbane instead.

It’s all good!

Update (3 July): More likely I’ll be going to Brisbane next week…

Second update (4 July): Brisbane flights and accommodation are now booked. And I’ve been able to get a points upgrade to Business Class on the return flight on Qantas. Unfortunately, the flight over is on VirginBlue via Sydney, so it will be a long haul. However, I haven’t flown VirginBlue before, so it will be interesting to see how it compares with Qantas. The other staff fly over on Sunday; I couldn’t get on that flight so will be going on Monday, which means an early rise Monday morning to drive 3-4 hrs to Perth, then hang around the airport for the 3-4 hour flight to Sydney, then wait in Sydney an hour or two for the I-don’t-know-how-long flight to Brisbane.