Calculating the ROI for XML and DITA
I delivered this presentation on October 2 at Lavacon 2010 in San Diego. Many thanks to the noble souls who showed up at 8 a.m. (!) on a beautiful Saturday (!!) morning.
Distilling 20 years of tech comm into eight words of advice
Last month marked my 20th year working in technical communication. (Please send all congratulatory pastries and chocolates to Scriptorium’s offices. Thank you!)
The business of technical communication
By default, managers and executives see technical communication as a cost center, similar to a QA department or a Human Resources group.
“Necessary evil” is not where you want to be for great career success.
How to succeed in ePub building with really trying
The ePub spec is long and very formal, but the format itself is fairly straightforward. And while building an ePub by hand is not complicated in itself, reworking content from other formats can be tricky.
Reengineering the humble datasheet
This year is shaping up as the Year of the Many Datasheets. Several customers approached us with variations on this theme:
Webcast: Extracting deliverables from DITA
In this webcast, Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium surveys DITA’s publishing options and weighs their practical implications.
All your followers are belong to us?
In our latest hiring round, I’m seeing something new: candidates with existing social media networks. If we hire one of these candidates,
Balancing user advocacy and corporate responsibilities
Anne Gentle, in the post Writing Engaging Technical Documentation, says this:
I love it when I hear people say, “I no longer work for development. I work for the user.”
Retail therapy for tech comm (and I don’t mean shopping)
“She’s stupid.”
That’s what a shopper recently said about a coworker’s daughter, who is working a part-time retail job.
