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Author: Sarah O'Keefe

Webinar

Webinar mania!

I have several webinar-related updates to share:

Next week, the State of Structure

You probably know that Scriptorium conducted an industry survey on structured authoring earlier this year. The report, The State of Structure in Technical Communication, is available in our online store for $200.

There is a cheaper option to get the highlights. On Tuesday, June 16, at 1 p.m. Eastern time, I’ll be delivering a one-hour webinar that highlights the most important findings.

Coming in July and August

Expect to see additional webinars in cooperation with our TechComm Alliance partners, Cherryleaf and HyperWrite. We are also welcoming Jack Molisani of ProSpring, who will offer excellent and candid career development advice. Watch this space for details about these upcoming events. Scriptorium consultants will also be offering additional content.

Recorded events

Two of our recent webinars are now available for download:

  • Hacking the DITA Open Toolkit
  • Documentation as Conversation

Each webinar lasts about one hour and is $20, either live or recorded. You can register for the Tuesday webcast and download recordings in our online store.

(Warning: The recorded webcast files are quite large.)

Sarah O'Keefe
June 9, 2009
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Food & fun

More cowbell!

About a year ago, we added Google Analytics to our web site. I have done some research to see what posts were the most popular in the past year:

  1. The clear winner was our FrameMaker 9 review. With 21 comments, I think it was also the most heavily commented post. Interestingly, the post itself is little more than a pointer to the PDF file that contains the actual review.
  2. InDesign CS4 = Hannibal post, which discussed InDesign’s encroachment on traditional FrameMaker features.
  3. A surprise…a post from 2006 in which Mark Baker discussed the merits (or lack thereof) of DITA in To DITA or not to DITA

Our readers appear to like clever headlines, because I don’t think the content quality explains the high numbers for posts such as:

We noticed this pattern recently, when a carefully crafted, meticulously written post was ignored in favor of a throwaway post dashed off in minutes with a catchy title (Death to Recipes!).

For useful, thoughtful advice on blogging, I refer you to Tom Johnson and Rich Maggiani. I, however, have a new set of blogging recommendations:

  1. Write catchy titles
  2. Have an opinion, preferably an outrageous one
  3. More cowbell

Sarah O'Keefe
June 4, 2009
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Localization

Think global

All your docs are belong to us.
We are joining with a couple of other technical communication companies to form the TechComm Alliance:

Three companies—Cherryleaf Ltd., HyperWrite, and Scriptorium Publishing—are forming TechComm Alliance to help us handle technical communication projects around the world. We are located in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, respectively, and each company has customers in both its home location and in other countries. TechComm Alliance will make it easier to work with global companies that need services worldwide.

How will this work? We expect to:

  • Work together on large projects that require support in multiple locations. For instance, Scriptorium might be implementing structured authoring for a U.S. company that also has operations in Europe and Australia. During rollout, instead of sending a Scriptorium consultant around the world, we partner with Cherryleaf for the training in Europe and with HyperWrite for the training in Australia. The result? Our customer saves on travel expenses, and our consultants spend less time in airplanes.
  • Refer projects to each other. Each company has (and will continue to have) clients around the world. When we feel that a local presence would benefit the customer, we can refer the project to our alliance partners.
  • Produce webinars and other events together. I’d like for Scriptorium customers to benefit from the expertise of our partners, and we are working on joint webinars.

Sarah O'Keefe
May 26, 2009
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Webinar

Documentation as conversation webinar

We have added Documentation as Conversation, presented by Anne Gentle, to our upcoming webinars. Anne is scheduled to present on June 9 at 11 a.m. Eastern time:

Even if your documentation system does not converse with your users, your documentation can help customers talk to each other and make the connections that help them do their jobs well or learn something new as if they were in a classroom with a community for classmates. This talk describes how you can think about documentation and user assistance in a conversational way, with the help of social media technology. I’ll discuss the topics in my new book, Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. I’ll describe the use of in-person Book Sprints that combine wikis and community events to gather together writers to accomplish documentation goals

Anne is an expert, perhaps the expert, on using wikis and other social media to extend traditional documentation efforts. She’s also an excellent speaker, so I hope you’ll join us for this session.

Register for Documentation as Conversation ($20)

See all upcoming webinars

PS We are working on additional topics and looking for more speakers. Do you have topics you would like us to cover? Please let us know. We are working on a couple of sessions on document conversion.

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Sarah O'Keefe
May 22, 2009
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DITA DITA XML—authors Food & fun

Death to Recipes!

I love food. I enjoy cooking and I especially enjoy eating. One of my favorite web sites is epicurious.com, and the kitchen shelf devoted to cookbooks sags alarmingly. Many Saturday mornings, you will find me here.

But I am not happy about how recipes have insinuated themselves into my work life. For some reason, the recipe is the default example of structured content. Look at what happens when you search Google for xml recipe example. Recipes are everywhere, not unlike high fructose corn syrup. Unfortunately, I am not immune to the XML recipe infiltration myself.

I understand the appeal. Recipes are:

  • highly structured content
  • well understood

But I think the example is getting a little tired and wilted. Let’s try working with something new. Try out a new kind of lettuce, er, example. This week, I’m trying to write a very basic introduction to structured authoring, and I’m paralyzed by my inability to think of any non-recipe examples.

I’m considering using a glossary as an example. After all, it’s a highly structure piece of content whose organization is well understood. Maybe I’ll use food items as my glossary entries. Baby steps…

PS It’s totally unrelated, but this article about two chefs eating their way through Durham (“nine restaurants in one night, at least five hours of eating and drinking”) is quite fun.

Sarah O'Keefe
May 19, 2009
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DITA DITA-OT Industry insights

DocTrain’s demise and a challenge to presenters

Unfortunate news in my inbox this morning:

I regret to announce that DocTrain DITA Indianapolis is cancelled. DocTrain/PUBSNET Inc is shutting down.

As a business owner, messages like this strike fear in my heart. If it could happen to them…gulp. (This might be a good time to mention that we are ALWAYS looking for projects, so send them on over, please.) My condolences to the principals at DocTrain.

Meanwhile, I’m also thinking about what we can do in place of the event. I had a couple of presentations scheduled for DocTrain DITA, and Simon Bate was planning a day-long workshop on DITA Open Toolkit configuration.

So, here’s the plan. We are going to offer a couple of webinars based on the sessions we were planning to do at DocTrain DITA:

Each webinar is $20. We may record the webinars and make the recordings available later, but I’m not making any promises. Registration is limited to 50 people.

Here’s the challenge part: If you were scheduled to present at DocTrain DITA (or weren’t but have something useful to say), please set up a webcast of your presentation. It would be ultra-cool if we could replicate the event online (I know that the first week in June was cleared on your schedule!), but let’s get as much of this content as possible available. If you do not have a way to offer a webinar, let me know, and I’ll work with you to host it through Scriptorium.

And here’s my challenge to those of you who like to attend conferences: Please consider supporting these online events. If $20 is truly more than you can afford, contact me.

Sarah O'Keefe
May 18, 2009
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Localization Structured content

Building efficient multilingual workflows

STC Intercom, April 2009

A common argument for XML-based workflows is that they automate production and localization tasks. With XML, localization can be reduced to a fraction of its original cost, but how exactly does that happen?

Sarah explores automization in localization and two technology standards used in multilingual workflows: The Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) and XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF).

Download the PDF PDF file (125 K)

Sarah O'Keefe
April 30, 2009
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DITA

DITA adoption increasing overall structured authoring adoption

I’m knee-deep in survey data analysis. With over 600 responses, our recent structured authoring survey was hugely successful–thank you. Many respondents added candid details about their experiences with structured authoring implementation–their fears, mistakes, and biggest surprises.

The survey report will be available later this month (free to participants, $200 for others), but I wanted to give you a couple of preliminary highlights:

  • About 30 percent of respondents said that they are currently using structured authoring.
  • There’s a lot of hype around DITA, but our data indicates that it’s backed up by reality. Consider this chart, which shows the top three types of structure (custom, DocBook, or DITA) implemented, being implemented, or planned.

DITA accounts for the vast majority of structure implementations--past, present, and futureDITA dominates the chart. But it looks as though DITA is additive. That is, it’s not cannibalizing the numbers for DocBook or custom structures. Those numbers are relatively flat. Instead, it looks as though DITA is increasing the total number of implementations.

If you are attending the STC Summit this year, I’m doing a presentation on the survey results on Monday, May 4, at 1:30 p.m., called “The State of Structure.”

Sarah O'Keefe
March 30, 2009
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Structured content Training

What do Tech Writers Want?

Answer? I don’t know, but The Content Wrangler is conducting a survey to find out. Here’s the announcement:

2009 is a touch economic year for most of us. Companies are cutting back on nice-to-have purchases and focusing in on what’s necessary. This survey conducted by The Content Wrangler aims to help us better understand your training needs for 2009 and to identify the types of classes you need. We plan to use this information to help training providers create relevant public and on-site training programs that address your needs and to gain an understanding of the current state of training program interest in our industry today.

In case you need further motivation, there is also a random drawing for some goodies. The survey has only five questions, so it should be quick.

Take the survey

Sarah O'Keefe
March 26, 2009
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Industry insights

Life in the desert

Last week, I attended the annual DocTrain West event, which was held this year in Palm Springs, California.

Weather in Palm Springs was spectacular as always with highs in the 80s during the day. Some of my more northerly friends seemed a bit shell-shocked by the sudden change from snow and slush to sun and sand. (North Carolina was 40 degrees when I left, so that was a nice change for me as well.)

Scott Abel did his usual fine job of organizing and somehow being omnipresent.

I promised to post my session slides. The closing keynote was mostly images and is probably not that useful without audio, so I’m going to point you to an article that covers similar ground (What do Movable Type and XML Have in Common, PDF link).

I have embedded the slides from my DITA to PDF session below.

Demystifying DITA to PDF Publishing

View more presentations from Scriptorium.

I have also posted the InDesign template file and the XSL we built to preprocess the DITA XML into something that InDesign likes on our wiki. Note that running the XSL requires a working configuration of the DITA Open Toolkit. For more information, refer to the DITA to InDesign page on our wiki.

Sarah O'Keefe
March 23, 2009
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