If you’ve followed this thread for awhile, then I hope by now you’re making great videos. Let’s assume your content is instructive, interesting and well-written, all of your equipment is working the way you want, and you have a good on-camera presence. It’s still possible though that you’re making boring videos. The main reason is…
Read MoreLast year I wrote about how to create a great animated GIF by first creating a video. In fact I used the procedure described there to generate animated GIF banners for some of our website pages. Another similar problem, whether building a website or creating graphics to go in your videos, is converting SVG files…
Read More“It’s a 0.5 story point bugfix, how hard could it be?” With the recent overhaul of our User Guide UI and its new layout, we inadvertently broke a small but useful feature: the local TOC stopped highlighting the currently active section. Digging into the legacy implementation revealed that this behavior originally came from Bootstrap’s ScrollSpy…
Read MoreWelcome back to our ongoing series on creating online IT tutorial videos. The last two times we talked about speeding up your graphics, and how the entire workflow works from writing all the way to the final product. Today let’s do a deep dive on just the Editing process: once you have your digital resources…
Read MoreIn NetEye, we use Ansible to automate many different tasks in an idempotent way, ranging from the first installation of the system to updates and upgrades. Ansible already comes with many built-in useful modules to manage files, perform HTTPS requests and much more. Furthermore, various Ansible Collections have been developed by the community to address…
Read MoreMany people already are. Whoa, whoa. We need to back up a bit here. Really good GPT-based text generators have now been generally available for 3 years now. And they’ve now been adopted by a large number of corporations, especially IT-centric ones. I shouldn’t even say “adopted”. They’re being “pushed” because of worries that employees’…
Read MoreAt Würth Phoenix, we’re no strangers to the ever-evolving world of technology. As part of our continuous innovation process and culture, we’ve been enhancing our user guide to support Elasticsearch’s ELSER model for semantic search. The goal is to improve the efficiency and accuracy of our searches, powered by machine learning. However, in typical developer…
Read MoreWelcome back! Last time we looked at some concrete examples of animations where you can use math to animate large numbers of objects, field-like effects, or complex behavior. Today let’s look at the principal barrier to using an animation you make (if it’s not a filled rectangle and if you want to put it in…
Read MoreIn a previous blog post by one of my colleagues, we shared how we developed a powerful semantic search engine for our NetEye User Guide. This solution uses Elasticsearch in combination with machine learning models like ELSER to index and query our documentation. While the proof of concept (POC) worked great, there was a challenge…
Read MoreHi again! At the end of my last blog I left you hanging. I promised some concrete examples of useful animations you could do in-house, using just math. And here I am, examples in hand! Although they could be finished animations in specific situations, they’re more likely to be parts of a larger picture, so…
Read MoreHello budget videographers and user guide writers! Have you ever looked on with envy at some of those fancy animations in online videos and wondered “How can I do that?” Well, I can’t solve all your problems, but I can give you some examples, pointers and resources to get you started. For your videos you…
Read MoreWhen we talk about APIs, we developers are generally biased, and focus on how they’re implemented technically – how they work, how they integrate into larger systems – and we settle for that. But there’s a valuable part of API development that often gets overlooked: creating their descriptions. This practice tends to be undervalued, so…
Read MoreConfession time. I can easily spend between 1 and 2 weeks creating a 5 minute long video. 3 weeks if I’m being a perfectionist. Of course, those videos are awesome, and are highly tailored to a specific audience. They say what I want to say. In this blog I’m always looking into efficiency and productivity…
Read MoreHave you ever finished filming your video segments, inserted them into your video project, and thought “Now I just need a few hours to add the graphics, and I’ll be done!”… but you actually wind up finishing 3 days later? Then it’s time we talked about cutting that time down. There are several aspects to…
Read MoreIn this series I’ve given you lots of advice on making your own tutorial-style IT videos for YouTube as a single DIY “maker”: writer, lighting, director, cameraman, editor, audio specialist, etc. But these posts weren’t written in the order of my “workflow”, i.e. the sequence I actually go through when making a new video. So…
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