Use cases for content reuse
Looking for ways to save your company time and money? Content reuse allows you to write content once and use it again in multiple places. Do these use cases for reuse apply to your content?
Content management
Standardizing company terminology
Do your customers know the right words to search for? Does marketing refer to your product one way while the tech team refers to it another? Inconsistent word use causes confusion within your company and negatively affects customers’ perception of your brand. So what causes the inconsistencies, and how do you fix them?
Full transcript of CMS/DITA NA conference interviews: part two (podcast)
Elizabeth Patterson: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast. Brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997 Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way.
E. Patterson: In episode 51, we talk with vendors at the CMS DITA North America Conference about how they have seen DITA evolve during their time in the industry. This is part two of a two-part podcast.
Full transcript of CMS/DITA NA conference interviews: part one (podcast)
Elizabeth Patterson: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In Episode 50, we talk with attendees at the CMS/DITA North America Conference about how they have used DITA in their career and the challenges they have overcome. This is part one of a two-part podcast.
Full transcript of What is content strategy? (podcast)
Bill Swallow: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 44, we take a look at several definitions of content strategy. Do they work, and are they accurate? Hey everyone, I’m Bill Swallow. I’m here with Sarah O’Keefe.
Full transcript of Tools selection podcast
Gretyl Kinsey: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts Podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 43, we talk about how to make sure you’re selecting the right tools for developing and managing content. Hello, and welcome. I am Gretyl Kinsey.
Full transcript of Battling content strategy inertia podcast
Sarah O’Keefe: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 34 of this podcast, we talk about inertia. It’s August, so here we are in the dog days of summer in North Carolina. It’s hot and humid, and doing absolutely nothing seems like pretty much the best and only strategy right now. That got us thinking about inertia in content strategy. It takes a big push to get a content strategy project moving, and a lot of times, do nothing seems like a much safer strategy than actually taking action and doing something. But of course, the choice to do nothing is, itself, a decision, and may lead to sunburn if you just stay out there too long.
Single-sourcing is dead. Long live shared pipes!
The term single-sourcing is too simplistic to describe today’s content creation environments.
Full transcript of content strategy pitfalls: tools podcast
Alan Pringle: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997 Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 25 we begin an occasional series on content strategy pitfalls. What are the traps, snares and dangers that the intrepid content strategist will encounter? What’s the best way to avoid danger, injury and even project death? In this episode we’ll focus on software and tool problems.
Does Markdown fit into your content strategy?
Markdown is a text-based markup language designed for content authoring. Using a limited set of formatting marks, you can create content and render it to HTML or another format.
There’s a growing buzz about Markdown in the technical communication community. While great for quick content development, there are some limitations to its usefulness.
Cleaning up your product content lifecycle
The product content lifecycle should result in information that is traceable–each data point in a document should point back to a database or another information source from which the data point was derived.
But unfortunately, we are not there yet.
Full transcript of death of PDF podcast
00:00 Alan Pringle: Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 17 we discussed PDF. In a previous podcast, we talked about the death of training. So, now it’s time to discuss the death of PDF.
Defining a content strategy
The scope and practice of content strategy is ever-expanding. From marketing to user experience to technical content development, the need for a strategy governing content creation and production grows. With this growth, the definitions of content strategy can vary, but they all recognize that the need for effective and targeted content is critical.
Return of the technical editor?
I’ve seen quite a few comebacks in my time, from bellbottoms to grungy flannel. But most of these trends are short-lived. A once long-standing staple among technical writing and content authoring groups has nearly gone extinct: the technical editor. Is it time for this role to make a comeback?
Beyond production: DITA transformations for QA
I’ve written in the past on how a QA mindset can improve the quality and consistency of your content. While having a robust test set and test plan are useful, there’s another tool that you can use.
Tools are not a content strategy
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
Content creators love their tools. So much, in fact, they sometimes mistake selecting tools for developing a content strategy.
Classic content strategy mistake: re-creating old formatting with new tools
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
A common content strategy mistake is duplicating the look-and-feel of existing content when you’re implementing new tools and processes.
DITA to InDesign: getting your paragraph styles in order
Getting your DITA content into a high-design format like InDesign is a tricky prospect. The biggest stumbling block is the fact that there is no intrinsic link between your ICML and the template that you flow it into. In the end, your InDesign template (you’re using one, right?) is the most important part of a DITA to ICML workflow; it contains the actual styles that will control how your output appears.
Four years later, PDF is not dead
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
In 2013, I wrote that PDF is not dead. Four years later, it’s still too early to write the obituary.
Still valid after all of these years…
This post is part of Scriptorium’s 20th anniversary celebration.
In addition to Scriptorium’s twentieth anniversary, 2017 marks the twelfth year for this blog, which started in April 2005 with a grudging And another one bites the dust… post.
Content strategy success: from technical to tangible
A content strategy implementation requires you to address multiple technical facets: tool and process integration, specifications for how content is delivered, and so on. These technical details, however, are of little interest to the executives who control funding. They are much more interested in seeing results to justify continued spending.
DITA to InDesign: the gruesome details
We’ve written before on what lurks beneath the surface of an InDesign file, and how drastically it differs from the DITA standard. When you’re looking at going from DITA to InDesign, though, there’s a lot that you need to take into consideration before you jump in.
Glue strategy: connecting web CMS to CCMS
Web sites are fantastic at content delivery and generally terrible for content authoring. If you’re old enough (like me), you may have experienced the pain of hand-coding HTML or even editing HTML files live on your web server.
Business case/ROI
Content management
Content reuse
DITA
DITA XML—authors
Localization
Structured content
Translation
Reduce translation costs with XML
$0.21 per word.
That’s the average cost in the US to translate content into another language according to Slator, a translation news and analytics site. That number is not speculative; they analyzed the costs per word from over 80 actual proposals gathered by the US General Services Administration (GSA). You can view the source proposals here.
