It’s funny how social media can work so well sometimes. I happened to be playing with a new Twitter client (Choqok for KDE, if you must know) over the weekend and TweetOpenSource had a link to 100 Awesome Open Source Tools for Writers, Journalists, and Bloggers. After a quick look, I retweeted the link.

Anne Wayman, who used to run the Freelance Writing page at About.com, and has since struck out on her own, saw my retweet and posted it on her blog. I’m now returning the favor (Thanks, Anne!).

Anyway, the list is interesting. While not everything on the list is open source (Evernote for sure, and perhaps there are others that I’m not aware of), everything is free. All the tools I talked about at the WritersUA conference are on this list. I haven’t used a bunch of these tools, and I look forward to trying many of them.

A couple of notes and quibbles:

• I would have switched the categories of LyX and Scribus. LyX is a document manager and writing tool. Scribus is a desktop publisher that prefers that you write your content elsewhere and import it on to a page.
• NeoOffice was created as a Mac version of OpenOffice, but now that OOo has its own Mac version, I don’t know if NeoOffice is still in production. Could be wrong, though.
• Azureus has a new name, Vuze.
• It’s been a long time since NVU has been in production. If you’re interested in a simple web authoring system, KompoZer might suit you better.
• The list cheats a little, in that Pidgin is the new name for the Gaim instant messenger (AOL was never too happy with the old moniker).

But overall, if you’re new to open source tools, this list is a great place to start.

What do you think of the list? What’s missing? Anything that doesn’t belong? Comment freely.

In but 90 minutes I’ll be on a bus to The Second City for WordCamp Chicago. I’m really looking forward to having my first contact with the WordPress blogging community, and learning more about how this platform works.

Power and bandwidth permitting, I’ll be liveblogging on Twitter, with perhaps some notes here as well. Follow all the action at #wcchicago. For any of you who might be there, look for me in the brown BarCampMilwaukee 3 t-shirt with Workingwriter written on the front.

It’s always good news when a major desktop Linux project hits a milestone release, and so it is with KOffice 2.0.0 being released this week. The KOffice team realized the tremendous opportunity for reinvention offered by its KDE 4 parent community, and have worked to make this suite more usable and compatible.

The biggest transformation in KOffice 2 is the Flake Shape concept, described as something

as simple as a square or a circle or as complex as a chart or a music score.
With Flake, any KOffice application can handle any shape. For instance, KWord can embed bitmap graphics, Krita can embed vector graphics and Karbon can embed charts.

This could be very cool.

It’s also an excellent decision to standardize on the Open Document Format (ODF) as the default output. KOffice 1.x had its own default format that was widely ignored when other applications built filters, making it very difficult to share KOffice docs with anyone. The move to ODF should largely solve that problem, and it won’t hurt that a Windows port (thanks to the Qt4 base) is also available.

As with KDE 4.0, KOffice 2.0 is viewed by its development team as very much a work in progress. The announcement is strewn with phrases like “first preview,” “first of a long series,” and “not aimed at end users.” I’m going to withhold judgment until we get a more stable and mature release, probably next year. The team projects a version 2.1 in late fall 2009. But I do intend to play with the new KWord and the other components in the coming days.

While the vast majority of folks who even have a mental picture of an “open source office suite” think solely about OpenOffice.org, open source (as I so often say) is really all about choices. So it’s good that KOffice continues to pursue its vision, independent of any company. One hopes that continuing success in building an alternative suite might even persuade the folks involved in the GNOME Office project(s) to revive their integration efforts to provide yet another alternative.

I’ve been busy working on a summary of my WritersUA Conference experience, but while I’m doing that, the first week in June is shaping up to be a great time for writers in the Midwest (and elsewhere) to get together and talk in the next few months.

• June 2-5: The DocTrain DITA Conference is in Indianapolis. For the rest of April, they have a pretty amazing special going, acknowledging the difficulty in getting people to come to conferences in a deep recession. if you call them at 978-649-8555 to register, you can get the two-day conference registration (on the 3rd and 4th), hands-on software and DITA skills workshops on the 2nd and 5th, all meals, AND three nights at the conference hotel for $999. The only other money you’d have to come up with is transportation. While that still works out to $250 a day, that’s still within many companies reach, and will be an important investment for folks looking at the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. That should be just about everyone involved in online user assistance.
• June 6-7: WordCampChicago is likely to be a great time to learn more about WordPress, the platform that this and many other blogs run on. Lisa Sabin-Wilson of WordPress for Dummies fame is involved. Matt Mullenweg will give a “State of the Word” address on Saturday, and many other great things will undoubtedly happen. Of course, it’s all free of charge. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to be there, because I will be at…
• June 6: WriteCampMilwaukee, a first-of-its-kind (that I know of anyway) unconference for writers of all genres. OnMilwaukee.com covered it in a short piece today. I’m going to do a session on getting into technical writing, and maybe introduce folks to the National Writers Union too. So if you write for a living, or write just to live, come share with us.

Finally, if you work on documentation for open source projects, you should think about hitting one more June conference: Writing Open Source in Owen Sound, Ontario on June 12-14. This is an intriguing idea, and while I may not have the resources to go, hope springs eternal.

All in all, some great opportunities.

Yesterday was Ada Lovelace Day, a day to honor women in technology. When I first heard about the event, I knew instantly who I wanted to honor. Though we never met, this woman helped inspire me to participate in the community that is the Internet. I’d lost track of what she was doing over the years, so I had to do some research, which of course led to more research … so, I’m late.

So let me introduce you to an underappreciated Internet visionary, one of the original Netizens: Ronda Hauben. In her youth, Hauben worked in Detroit at the world’s largest car factory, Ford Rouge. As the story goes, Ford was sponsoring continuing education classes in computer programming. Hauben and others were outraged when the company canceled the program in 1987. After an unsuccessful attempt to revive the company-sponsored program, Hauben launched The Amateur Computerist newsletter to foster technology education among the workers. The first issue (PDF link) came out on February 11, 1988, the 51^st anniversary of the Flint Sit-Down Strike. It declared:

We want to keep interest alive because computers are the future. We want to disperse information to users about computers. Since the computer is still in the early stage of development, the ideas and experiences of the users need to be shared and built on if this technology is to advance. To this end, this newsletter is dedicated to all people interested in learning about computers.

Sometime later, Hauben found Usenet newsgroups, and figured out early that collaboration and participation among users were the key to the future. In September 1992, the alt.amateur-comp newsgroup was founded to circulate the electronic version of the newsletter, which was:

dedicated to support for grassroots efforts and movements like the “computers for the people movement” that gave birth to the personal computer in the 1970s and 1980s. Hard efforts of many people over hundreds of years led to the production of a working computer in the 1940s and then a personal computer that people could afford in the 1970s. This history has been serialized in several issues of the newsletter.

A year later, Hauben delivered a speech on the history and promise of Usenet, which may have been my first acquaintance with her work.

Among the early stories The Amateur Computerist published included one of the first histories of Usenet in its Fall 1992 Supplement, “The Linux Movement” and the Free Software Foundation in Spring 1994, and more than a few basic (and BASIC) programs for its readers to try out, much like Dr. Dobb’s Journal.

In 1994, Ronda and her son Michael released Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet for free on the web. It was later published by IEEE Computer Society Press. It offers a terrific glimpse at the early history of the Internet, and an important discussion of its promise that remains largely relevant today; especially with the increasing corporatization of the Net.

Today, Ronda is a citizen journalist living in New York City. She is an award-winning United Nations correspondent for OhMyNewsInternational, and still contributes articles on the democratic promise of the Internet.

So go out and take a look at the complete Amateur Computerist archives, and think about how you can contribute to your online communities—including this one. Comments always appreciated.

Although I was a bit late in getting it, I really enjoyed reading Ryan Cartwright’s
10 things for non-coders to do with free software over Christmas yesterday. The piece reminds us that

Some of us will find some kind of alleged spare time on our hands over the next few weeks. Certainly, there’s often some kind of break from “work” over the festive season. Traditionally free software developers have used such times for long coding sessions, get-togethers and “hack-fests”. Of course we’re not all hard-core (or even soft-core) hackers so here’s a few suggestions for the rest of us who might want to try something new over Christmas.

As it happens, I’ve been trying some of these suggestions even before I read them, so for inspiration here’s a report of how one non-coder broke his routine.

• Run an application you’ve not tried before: As part of the writing process for openSUSE Unleashed, I have to experiment with all sorts of different applications. One thing I’m working on is improving my project management skills. So I’ve been playing with TaskJuggler, OpenProj, and GNOME Planner of late. I’ll try to report on this exploration soon.
• Resolve that ongoing issue: As you may know, Adobe recently released an AIR client for Linux. The Adobe Integrated Runtime is Flash-based, and several cross-platform Twitter clients are built on it. Development on Linux was relatively rapid, if well behind the Windows and Mac. Problem was, it stopped working altogether with my final-release copy. One morning I finally resolved to see if this was fixable. It didn’t take much Googling to learn that the pre-release versions had to come out first. While I wish the installer would have done that itself, I am glad that the solution was posted on the Adobe website. Now if only TweetDeck wouldn’t completely disappear every time I switch desktops. <sigh>
• File a bug report: Actually, I’ve done two of these lately. One a regular bug, the other a wish list item. The bug was a big deal. When I upgraded my desktop to openSUSE 11.1, YaST became incapable of updating packages. While the install went beautifully, every time I tried to add the Community Repositories, or just do an online update, I’d get a series of ‘Couldn’t resolve host’ messages because Zypper couldn’t find any repositories. But the network was fine. Making a long story short, after posting a note to the openSUSE mailing list, and seeing some postings on the openSUSE forums, I decided to investigate if there was an issue with IPv6. To my surprise, unchecking the IPv6 support box in YaST’s Network Settings and rebooting did the trick. I posted this in the openSUSE Bugzilla. Haven’t gotten a response yet, but I hope this will be fixed.

  The wishlist item was for KMail, and could also apply to the Resolving an Ongoing Issue task. Back in the day, I used the Eudora email client in Windows 3.x and beyond. I still fondly remember many of the things it did that I just don’t see anymore. One simple thing it did that I wish other clients did was tell you when it was next going to check the POP server for new mail. This time would appear next to the Check Mail menu item. I asked for this at the KDE bug site. Again, maybe it will happen, maybe not. But if developers don’t know what you’re thinking, they can’t add that tiny little feature that makes some people happier.

• Read a book: While I certainly hope that you’ll pick up openSUSE Linux Unleashed for edification from time to time, I do try to read books too. Right now, I’m trying to learn PHP and Drupal, perhaps so I don’t spend my entire life as a non-coder. I’ve been pulling older things from my bookshelf: Julie Meloni’s Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache, and David Mercer’s Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites. I know Mercer has a new edition of the latter, but I’m finding this one still useful as a start.
• Play a game: This is part work, part play. Considering all the time I spend in front of a PC monitor, you’d think that there would be some associated recreational activity. Tragically, nearly all the fun I have with my computer is cracking wise on Twitter and Identi.ca. But I put an entire chapter about gaming in the new book, so I’m playing actual games. While I’m not much into role-playing or shooting things up, I’m starting to spend time with FreeCiv and LinCity-NG. It would be nice if there was a baseball simulation I could play, but maybe I wouldn’t have time for it anyway.

In addition to the stuff I’ve tried recently, these are great ideas that you should try to do sometime:

• Try a new distribution: Once I went to a Linux User Group meeting and told someone that I write books about SUSE Linux. “That’s kinda sad,” he said. “You’re pretty much stuck with using one distro.” That’s not entirely true, even if it is close. I do get to play with my Kubuntu Dell laptop from time to time. Fortunately, you aren’t under the same harness. So yes, try other distributions. There are hundreds of them listed at DistroWatch. If you’re running Fedora, openSUSE or some other distro with RPM-based package management, you should certainly try one with apt, or vice versa. Get a virtual machine going with VirtualBox or Xen, and change the distro in the VM every other week. There is much fun to be had!
• Write a Tutorial: Well, this is what I do pretty much every day. But as Cartwright notes, “You might think you’re not a writer; well so did I, and I’m willing to state that you can explain how to do a mail-merge in OpenOffice.org, touch up a photograph in GIMP or manage a play-list in Amarok. Yes, much of this stuff is in manuals and other documentation but you know what? Sometimes people don’t want to wade through that; they want a quick guide instead.” Like this Adobe Flashplayer HOWTO someone posted to openSUSE.org just this weekend:
• Contribute to a wiki: Wikis are collaborative websites. They don’t work unless people like you contribute. So sure, fix typos and add resource links on Wikipedia articles. Do the same on opensuse.org. But that’s not all. When I’m poking around for more information about a piece of software that I’m just getting started with, or investigating, too often I see nearly barren wikis. The team has the right philosophy (let everyone contribute), but the community isn’t participating. You can do your small part to fix it.
• Help a Sourceforge project: Every time someone asks me how to become a technical writer, I tell them to find some open source project that needs some user documentation and offer to provide it. You get practice asking questions of developers, work on your writing style, and have something for your portfolio at the end (thus solving the classic “But how do I get experience” dilemma). As Cartwright notes, there are lots of non-coding ways to help at the Sourceforge Help Wanted page. So check in every now and then.
• Switch off your computer: Isn’t there something out in the real world that can relax or inspire you? Isn’t there a Linux User Group nearby that meets every month? Sign up at Meetup too. Do try to get out once in awhile, OK?

Trying something new makes you smarter, improves your memory, and may even stave off Alzheimer’s disease. The FLOSS community depends on all of its members–yes, that means even you–to participate. Don’t make it a New Year’s resolution if you don’t want to, but just do it, OK? Thanks!

In my last post, I told you about the talk I’m giving at the WritersUA Conference next April Fool’s Day. While the post wasn’t exactly content-free, it was certainly more about me, and not-so-much about the promised topic: Open Source Technical Communication Tools. While you can find that information at the conference website, it’s only right that I give you a hint about the plan for this presentation.

Basically, I’m going to be talking about a selection of open source tools that a technical communicator can use to ply his/her trade. Paul Mueller from User Aid will take up a selection of (mostly) web-based applications to help consultants and small teams handle some of the business tasks independent writers (usually) can’t stand to do.

My 35 minutes will cover these tools:

• OpenOffice.org: Every tech writer needs a word processor, most need a way to make Portable Document Format (PDF) files, and some need spreadsheets and a presentation tool. Perhaps you already know about the free, standards-based alternative to Microsoft Office. I’m going to do a quick run-through on all the suite tools, with an emphasis on outlining, list numbering and master documents.
• LaTeX and LyX: Most technical communicators producing long documents destined for a printer work with (or long to work with) Adobe FrameMaker. It has a long and honored history, with a devoted following that has ascended FrameMaker’s fairly steep learning curve. The community pretty much lives with periodic rumors of the application’s demise. LaTeX and its many kin also has a long and honored history, is noted for its ability to handle long documents and technical tasks, and was far ahead of its time in seeing tags and styles as the proper basis for creating documents. Just recently I began to ascend the legendarily steep LaTeX learning curve, cheating a little by using the LyX GUI front-end. I’ll share some lessons.
• Scribus: If you need some old-fashioned desktop publishing for Quick Start Guides, short-form materials, or a newsletter, Scribus is a great alternative to Quark or InDesign. It will do PDF as well.
• The GIMP: Another open source challenger to the Adobe Creative Suite, the GNU Image Manipulation Program is a worthy alternative to Photoshop.
• Inkscape: A vector drawing tool that defaults to the web standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and creates very nice drawings and flow charts.

What’s cool about these applications is that they all run on Windows and Linux. I have to double-check on their Mac-friendliness before I do this presentation. This means that nearly every technical writer can get these tools and start using them today.

Time permitting, I’m also hoping to talk about my favorite web-based app, Evernote. While not open source (and needs Wine to run on Linux), it’s still a great tool for the mobile and/or forgetful. But that deserves its own post.

If you’re writing software manuals, online help and the like, you should try these. Let me know what you think about them, and if there are other apps in your open source toolkit that I should know about. I hope to see you in Seattle next spring!

Update: This is what I get for titling a post before writing it! In the event that you came here looking for great open source tools for technical communication, this really isn’t the right one. I will do that post tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Goodness it’s been awhile! Apologies to my readers for the delay. Much has been happening in the Metaverse of late, and I’ll be trying to catch up for a short period.

One of those things that’s been happening is that your humble scribe will be speaking at the WritersUA Conference in Seattle, WA next spring. This annual three-day conference for people who produce Software User Assistance is one of the places I learned my craft as a technical communicator, and I’m honored to share some of the things I’ve picked up since I last attended. The session is Wednesday, April 1. I’ll be discussing open source tools for technical communication, and Paul Mueller will talk about online tools for the independent writer. You can see the full conference schedule here.

There will be more to say as we get closer, but now’s the time to think about attending (and asking your boss if you can go). Ping me if you have questions.

BarCampMilwaukee3 is coming to a Bucketworks near you (if you happen to live reasonably near Lake Michigan). The annual technology un-conference will be happening October 4-5 in downtown Milwaukee.

And whether you can be here or not (and you really do want to be here), you can still participate. Contribute a design for the t-shirt the hundreds of attendees will wear!

You can find the details for the contest here: BarCampMilwaukee3 T-Shirt Contest | BarCampMilwaukee.. The key detail is that entries are due September 12 at midnight (Central Time). The prize is admittedly not substantial: 2 t-shirts shipped directly, plus of course the undying gratitude of BarCampers everywhere.

Don’t design logos? You can still participate: Voting and commenting takes place next weekend! Watch BarCampMilwaukee.com for the submissions.

And do come if you can. It’s a great time at a great facility with fun and knowledgeable people. Register (for free!) at the site.

Three years after Hurricane Katrina exposed so many ugly realities about life in the United States — chiefly our failing infrastructure and the government’s casual hatred of the poor and African-American — Louisiana is again bracing for another catastrophic storm.

I try not to delve into politics here at Notes from the Metaverse, but I know that technology and technical people played an important role in relief efforts in 2005. We can do this again in 2008. Andy Carvin from NPR has set up the Gustav Information Center (see the badge to the right there) to help coordinate things.

One of the first resources available is the Gustav wiki, designed to manage “static information” like agencies accepting donations, places for the displaced and survivors to find immediate help and the like.

With great hope that New Orleans and its people survive, I hope that as a worldwide community, we do our best.