Content management

Content management Content pitfalls Podcasts

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.

Bill Swallow

March 28, 2018

Content management

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.

Bill Swallow

February 5, 2018

Animation shows the process of extracting information from CAD, using it in tech pubs, but then updating the document and not the source CAD files as the product changes.

Content management

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.

Sarah O'Keefe

January 29, 2018

Content management Podcasts

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.

Sarah O'Keefe

November 9, 2017

Content management Information architecture Structured content

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.

Bill Swallow

September 11, 2017

Content management

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?

Bill Swallow

July 17, 2017

Content management DITA QA

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.

Jake Campbell

June 26, 2017

Content management Content pitfalls

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.

Alan Pringle

June 19, 2017

Content management Content pitfalls

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.

Alan Pringle

May 15, 2017

Content management DITA

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.

Jake Campbell

April 10, 2017

gravestone with statue coming out of grave

Content management

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.

Alan Pringle

March 20, 2017

Screen shot of 2005 post with a one-sentence highlight plus a link

Content lifecycle Content management

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.

Sarah O'Keefe

February 13, 2017

Content management Structured content

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.

Alan Pringle

January 30, 2017

Content management DITA

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.

Jake Campbell

October 10, 2016

CCMS CMS Content management DITA

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.

Sarah O'Keefe

September 12, 2016

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.

Bill Swallow

July 4, 2016

white Scriptorium owl on a blue background

Content management Content pitfalls Content silos

Content strategy patterns in the enterprise

What factors affect content strategy decisions? Every client has a different combination of requirements, and of course there are always outliers. But based on our consulting experience, here are some factors that affect content strategy decisions.

Sarah O'Keefe

June 13, 2016

Content management DITA Taxonomy

SubjectScheme explained

Your project is coming along nicely. You have your workflow ready, your style guides are composed, and things are looking up. However, you have complex metadata needs that are starting to cause problems. You need a way to ensure that authors are only using valid attribute values, and that your publication pipeline isn’t going to suffer. This is a situation that calls for a subjectScheme.

Jake Campbell

June 6, 2016

Business case/ROI Content management QA Structured content

QA in techcomm: creating use cases

A few months ago, I wrote about how you could benefit from having a test bed for your content. I made mention of use cases several times, but what are they, and how can you make them effective?

Jake Campbell

May 16, 2016

Content management QA

QA in techcomm: you need a test bed

When I first started as a QA tech at a small game company, I was immediately thrown into the QA test bed. It was a place where we could test production-ready content without being interrupted by ongoing development or server restarts. Functionality was well-documented and could be used to test against our users’ bug reports.

Jake Campbell

March 14, 2016

Content management Localization Translation

Translation and the complexity of simple content

Translating content for foreign markets can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. While it’s important to keep costs in check, the critical element to watch is quality. The only sure-fire way to ensure quality in translation is to build it into your source.

Bill Swallow

March 7, 2016

Content management DITA Localization

The second wave of DITA

You have DITA. Now what?

More companies are asking this question as DITA adoption increases. For many of our customers, the first wave of DITA means deciding whether it’s a good fit for their content. The companies that choose to implement DITA find that it increases the overall efficiency of content production with better reuse, automated formatting, and so on.

Sarah O'Keefe

February 1, 2016

Content management

The rise of part-time contributors

Content creation should no longer be the exclusive domain of full-time writers. Employees in other departments can offer valuable information that your company’s content should capture. Where can you find these part-time contributors?

Alan Pringle

December 7, 2015

Content debt Content management Content pitfalls

Lean content strategy

Lean manufacturing begat lean software development which in turn begat lean content strategy.

What does lean content strategy look like?

Sarah O'Keefe

September 28, 2015

Content management

Full transcript of content strategy pitfalls: tools podcast

Does Markdown fit into your content strategy?

Cleaning up your product content lifecycle

Full transcript of death of PDF podcast

Defining a content strategy

Return of the technical editor?

Beyond production: DITA transformations for QA

Tools are not a content strategy

Classic content strategy mistake: re-creating old formatting with new tools

DITA to InDesign: getting your paragraph styles in order

Four years later, PDF is not dead

Still valid after all of these years…

Content strategy success: from technical to tangible

DITA to InDesign: the gruesome details

Glue strategy: connecting web CMS to CCMS

Reduce translation costs with XML

Content strategy patterns in the enterprise

SubjectScheme explained

QA in techcomm: creating use cases

QA in techcomm: you need a test bed

Translation and the complexity of simple content

The second wave of DITA

The rise of part-time contributors

Lean content strategy

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