The politics of DITA
Deciding on a content model is a critical step in many of our projects. Should it be DITA or something else? The answer, it seems, often has more to do with our client’s corporate culture than with actual technical requirements.
Five questions to ask before distributing content as HTML
HTML5! Mobile! Responsive design!
It’s easy to get distracted by sparkly buzzwords when you investigate distributing your technical content as HTML. Instead, focus on a few basic but essential questions:
Webcast: Ensuring success with your CCMS
In this webcast, guest presenter Chip Gettinger of SDL discusses key success factors for component content management systems.
Adapt or die: Managing increasing content velocity
Content velocity is the speed at which we create and produce content, the speed of the publishing process itself, and the speed of change in content requirements—what we need to produce and the delivery mechanisms.
Adapt or die: style guide edition
Being cognizant of your environment and adapting accordingly is a good survival technique for any being (as Darwin recognized), and it’s particularly true in the professional world. And that’s why I’m puzzled by how much time tech writers spend agonizing over style and word choices in tech comm forums, on Twitter, and elsewhere.
Counterfactual ExtendScript history
In the late ’50s, my mom worked for the library at a large Canadian university. One day the library received an official letter from the U.S.S.R. asking the library to please return the Soviet Union’s encyclopedia for “revisions.”
Webcast: Trends in technical communication, 2013
Our trends webcast has become an annual event, and it’s our most popular webcast! Each year, we take our best shot at trends for the upcoming year with a mixture of serious and not-quite-serious predictions. In this webcast recording, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Bill Swallow, aka techcommdood, share their perspectives on trends for 2013.
2013 predictions in technical communication
Here we go again! My traditional blog topic to kick off a new year: predictions.
Perplexed by complex syntax: understanding syntax diagrams in DITA
What DITA elements are available for syntax diagrams? And how does one go about using them?
Mission: Impossible? Consistently good ebook formatting across devices
Your mission, should you decide to accept it: distribute content as ebooks.
