The Art of Technical Writing 2.0

(This post is for my friends who have not yet discovered the goodness of RSS feeds.)

Firstly what is a feed?

One eats food at regular/irregular intervals. Let’s say that every time you eat, it constitutes a feed. Similarly many sites publish content at different intervals. And every time fresh content is available, it means there is something new available to consume, hence feed.

How it works?

In most news sites and blogs, content is arranged in a particular manner. A blog post can have the following different parts - title, date, blog post text. Usually when content is arranged in such a manner it is “feed friendly” and it is easy for RSS softwares to read them and display them in different feed readers.

How can it be useful?

You love to read a variety of blogs and news sites but it may not be easy to remember and follow them all. Bookmarking is an option but it does not inform you of updates. So if a site has an RSS feed, you can subscribe to it and get the content delivered to your feed reader, which is similar to your email inbox.

How do I know if a site has an RSS feed?

Usually all sites that have a feed associated with it are designated with the RSS icon. Latest web browsers also indicate if the web page has an RSS Feed. In Mozilla Firefox it appears in the area where the URL appears. In case of Internet Explorer 7.0 it usually appears in the toolbar area.

The RSS feed icon looks like this -

How do I subscribe to an RSS feed?

This can also be done in multiple ways. One way is give your RSS feed reading software the URL of the site and let it find a feed that you can subscribe to.

Or

You can click the RSS Feed icon on the web page. Clicking this icon, usually displays the RSS feed. (This is a stripped down version of the site.) For example compare these two pages -

NY Times Home page: http://www.nytimes.com/

NY Times RSS Feed: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml

You can add the blog/webpage  URL in your Feed reading software, and the software will subscribe to the feed.

Where do I find a good feed reader?

I use the Google Reader, if you have a Google account, you can start using it here - http://www.google.com/reader/

There are many such online and offline tools. Do a google search and you will find more softwares.

More Questions?

If you have more questions, add them as comments and I will try to answer them.

First a promise I need to make to myself -

“I shall write here more often, God-willing.

Little blogs, mo-blogs, one-line posts, twitters or jaikus, call them what you want, but the world seems to have taken a liking towards this brand new way of saying thoughts into condensed sentences. The words here do not flow into streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent (that’s an Eliot line). It’s short and it’s sweet (at least in thought).

Webaroo (that’s where I work), has started a similar service. Though the service is currently available only for the Indian market, it still has a better way to reach its users. There is no sign-up required either to create a group or to read the content. SMS GupShup is what it is called and the blogs are called groups. The term blogs is still not as widely known or accepted in India.

I have been on SMS GupShup with my CityHaikus group. And its good to see that I have 52 subscribers, much more than the number who read this blog. Just shows that people love to consume in small packets. The service definitely has a future. It just needs to be built well and with a lot of thought.

Here’s a widget that contains some of my posts on the CityHaikus SMS GupShup group as well as some of the groups that I love and follow.

The widget is created by thakkar, some really hard and cool work. Its cool, but too much branding on it

When I was a dud, which is not very long back (I probably still am), I created a flickr account. Excited by the promise that it is a great way to store, search, and share photos. It is, but did you know that it only allows you to store 200 photos with a free account?

When I crossed that limit, I decided to explore flickr.

Here’s where I heard the word ‘Tags‘ (in the web 2.0 sense) for the first time. Tags are words (or phrases) to identify a photo (in flickr’s case). A photo should usually have multiple tags. It is also necessary to tag photos appropriately as flickr let’s you search photos by tags. The concept is simple (and brilliant) but I took some time to grasp it due the inertia of ignorance.

One of my first tag searches on flickr was for frogs (I love the creature), and I was amazed by the number of beautiful photos I saw. I spent an hour seeing frog photos.

Go ahead see some beautiful photos of your favorite things. You can try searching for your name and see if you get any photos.

There’s more to flickr than just tagging. I hope to continue in another post.

Here’s a design style guide that says things simply and beautifully.

It also pushes the argument that Web 2.0 is not merely a concept anymore, it has taken concrete shape and we are in the midst of a movement. The great thing about this movement is that it has a class of its own. When this movement comes to a pass the remains will be worth dedicating a museum too - like say the Louvre.
I have a feeling that I will be referring to this guide very often in the coming few days.

“Simplicity, according to me too will form one of the most necessary features of Web 2.0.”

In the next post we will explore how we can apply it to writing style.

Web 2.0 is the age of information.

Our ancestors lived in an age when the only way to access knowledge was through books. Between the time when my grandfather gifted me my first encyclopedia to today where I actually have edited a few entries on Wikipedia, man has traveled a long way.

The age of Web 1.0 was a phase when Internet was accessed by the elite and the erudite. The new version of the Web has made memory redundant. All you need to know is your email password and you are fine.

Today I was talking to one of my friends and she told me that a mutual friend of ours recently celebrated her birthday. I said that I must wish her belated happy birthday. She said that I was shameless.

I said that we Web 2.0 people are quite shameless.