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.
Using Ant to find a needle in a haystack
Many content management systems (CMSs) take over the responsibility of file naming. For the most part, this is fine and is actually necessary for maintaining cross-references and conrefs within the CMS. When you use the CMS to build a DITA map, the CMS uses its own names in the <topicref> elements.
A contrarian view of the future of publishing
Based on a quick Google search, things don’t look too hot for publishing:
The role of the gatekeeper is changing
Thanks to Peg Mulligan for hosting my guest post at her blog Content for a Convergent World. I wrote about the evolving role of the gatekeeper and the implications for technical communicators. Read the whole thing.
Tech Tips: Quick Word to DITA table conversion
The other day I had to convert a large table from Word to DITA. I started looking at Word XML output and thought about transforming it with XSL (which I have done in the past), but that seemed to be too much trouble for this document. Then I remembered a technique an old SQL coder showed me for loading large amounts of data into a SQL table. I realized this technique could be readily adapted to DITA.
Webcast: Knowledge integration: The future of technical communication
Scriptorium hosts Tristan Bishop of Symantec as he muses on technical communicators’ evolving roles.
Content strategy for foodies
Content is like food. At its best, it’s a carefully choreographed experience, like dining at a fine restaurant.
Webcast: DITA Specialization 101
Simon Bate of Scriptorium Publishing introduces specialization in the DITA open toolkit and walks viewers through the fundamentals.
