Ins And Outs of the Technical Editing SIG Web Site

In keeping with our promise to provide an article on watercooler chats, here is a summary article of the most recent watercooler chat. This chat was held on May 12, 2010, and it focused on using the TE SIG Web site.

Two Cool Site Features

Rick Sapir, the TE SIG webmaster started out by highlighting the two “cool” items on the site.

• Use of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) chatting system
• Mirroring of the discussion list with the SIG website forum, tweets, and Linked In

Two Important Things To Know About Our Site

Rick also mentioned the two important things to know about our site.

• First, just about everything and anything related to the SIG is available on our site.
• Second, the site is not the only way to get information. Much of the information on the site is automatically syndicated to Twitter, LinkedIn, RSS, and our mailing lists.

Becoming a Site Editor

Chat participants were encouraged to use the wiki. Rick indicated that all pages on the site are wiki pages. He stated that anyone could volunteer for the role of a site editor, and it was easy to create, update, or edit pages. However, Rick mentioned that for some reason, it seemed like people were hesitant to do so. Rick felt that the hesitancy is unwarranted because it is impossible to break any content and it is very easy to undo a change on our Web site.

Getting Past Being Overwhelmed

The TE SIG Web site has certainly improved over the past two years! However, Rick commented that based on the results of a recent Web site feedback survey, it seemed like some users felt that there was so much “stuff” that they did not know where to begin. One of the opinions expressed in the chat was that a newsletter article would help.

As a follow up, this summary article indicates what you can do to navigate through the Web site more easily.

• Visit the Welcome to Our New Web Site page that provides background information of the site
• Visit the New Member Help pages that explains how to use the Web site features
• Contact the webmaster if you run into problems when a feature does not behave as anticipated

For the interesting perspectives that were exchanged on the chat, you can see the chat transcript.

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