Hyper-Hyperlinks - Connecting Content
One of the great things about using Confluence for technical writing is that you can connect related topics using hyperlinks. 

These allows users to see these connections and navigate through your documentation in a logical way - and they're super-easy to create.

In fact this underlines one of the main advantages of having your content in a wiki: everything can be joined up. Although other documentation systems allow you to do this, the wiki makes it ridiculously easy to do so.

Not only that, you can find the links to any page really, really easily. In fact, you can do that in two clicks. See last week's blog for more info on how you can do this.

To add a link, all you have to do is select a word, then use Ctrl+K to open the Insert Link window.

From here you can:
  1. run a search for the appropriate page
  2. select from a list of recently viewed pages
  3. select and attachment
  4. insert a web link (URL)
  5. use the Advanced settings.

Although I use the first and fourth ones a lot, my favourite is the recently viewed pages option. This is simply because it's almost inevitable that I would have just been looking at the page I'm going to link to (to check it's the right page of course). 

As this page is normally at the top of the list, all I have to do is select it and press Insert. So with the very little effort that is required to click the mouse three times, I've created a link and can get on with something else.

Now then technical writers, the question is, how much easier can this get?
Cheers.
 
Successful Content Editing
This week I want to alert you to a little piece of Confluence functionality that does an awful lot of work. This is the info page, which you can find under the Tools menu.

This contains a lot of data about the page, for example its history, who's been editing it, when it was edited and its position in the hierarchy.

But by far the most important element for technical writers or other engaged in collaborative documentation are the two lists of links: incoming and outgoing. 
See the graphics at the bottom of the blog for examples.

These are incredibly useful as they allow you to see:
  • the pages are that referencing the page you have open
  • the pages the current page is linked to.

This means you can see what the related pages are. You can then jump to these pages to see if the edits on Page A affect anything on Page B. If so, you can edit it straight away. So, right here, right now.

By using the Info page, you have a much better chance of making sure that all the content of all the related pages is updated because you can easily find the connections.

Of course, it still pays to do a search for related content, but using the Info page will help reduce the amount of time spent on this. It also cuts out a lot of the uncertainty we have about knowing whether we, as technical authors and collaborators, have covered all the bases.
Cheers.