At MadWorld 2019 in San Diego, I presented a session called “10 tips that every MadCap Flare user should know.” I had many attendees ask if they could have my notes from the session, but the unfortunate reality was that I didn’t have notes. All I had was a simple list of about 25 tips, […]
A couple of weeks ago, I gave five hours of presentations at MadCap’s Madworld conference in San Diego. I’ve sat down a number of times to write out some of my key takeaways from that conference—the cool sessions I attended, the amazing things I learned, and the incredible people I met. Every time I sit […]
I’ve worked in hundreds of Flare projects since I started my business around 5½ years ago, and when you work in that many projects, you start to notice trends. There are a handful of issues that I know I’m likely to find in nearly any Flare project that I work in, and one of the […]
Recently, a client asked if we could keep the highlighted state of a Flare-generated TopNav menu item when a user clicks into any topic in that menu item’s tree. Previously, we had added a hover styling for TopNav items in the skin file, but the hover styling didn’t persist when a user clicked into a […]
Earlier this year, I was invited to write an article for ISTC Communicator, the journal of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators (ISTC). This week, the article was published. Here is a reproduction of the article in its entirety. How MadCap Flare re-ignited my career Daniel Ferguson shares his journey as a technical writer […]
Linking to external sites from your online help can be very helpful for your users. You can provide them quick access to good or even necessary resources to allow them to complete a task. But external links come with a downside. Over time, URLs change, and you can end up sending your users to non-existent […]
One of my MadWorld 2017 presentations is all about improving the performance of Flare HTML5 outputs. Quick page loads are an important factor in the overall success of your help. Slow page load times leave your users looking for answers to their questions elsewhere. While the overall performance of any website is subject to dozens […]
FontAwesome has become extremely popular and useful over the last few years. I’m getting more and more questions from clients and others in the Flare community about how to use FontAwesome in MadCap Flare projects. This article helps get you started. What is FontAwesome? FontAwesome is a collection of scalable vector icons and graphics that can […]
A few years back, I presented “MadCap Flare for the Total Newbie” as part of MadCap software’s free webinar series. As part of that presentation, I talked about Flare’s multi-channel publishing capabilities, and I gave an example of the way that one of my clients is using multi-channel publishing. In this case, my client is using […]
I am thrilled to once again be speaking at the upcoming MadWorld conference. This will be my third consecutive year as a speaker at this conference, and it always ranks as one of the highlights of my year. Great city, great sessions, great people! I’ll be teaching four sessions this year. Two of them are part […]