Structured authoring AND the web
We read Tom Johnson’s post on Structured authoring versus the web with some dismay. Tom is a persuasive, influential writer, but his article misses the mark in important ways.
Pay no GREAT attention to that man behind the curtain
Every department has its resident tech wizard: the maintainer of the templates, the DITA Open Toolkit, the wiki, and so on. What happens when that wizard flies off to a new kingdom?
2013 predictions in technical communication
Here we go again! My traditional blog topic to kick off a new year: predictions.
Mission: Impossible? Consistently good ebook formatting across devices
Your mission, should you decide to accept it: distribute content as ebooks.
Gone with the width: what’s the optimal length for a line of text?
When it comes to a line of text, how long is too long? And do the rules for text column width change when content is rendered on different devices?
2012 tekom thoughts
Some thoughts on technical communication, content strategy, and the state of the industry at tekom/tcworld 2012.
Design isn’t free
The mantra of XML is that you separate content from formatting. Authors do content; formatting happens later. During a panel discussion at last week’s (excellent) UA Europe conference, I realized that this is only half the story.
Cloudy with a chance of WOMBAT
For remote work, file management in the cloud is way easy. Other methods, not so much…
From Boulder to Bangalore
When I was a high school student in Boulder, Colorado, my first job was as a stock boy in an India-imports store. The store, Hamara Dukan, stocked all sorts of handicrafts and objets d’art from India including clothing, wood carvings, brass bowls and knickknacks, hand-printed bedspreads, incense, Kashmiri boxes, and thousands of other items. After working there for a couple of years, I acquired an appreciation of the things the country produced, but was always curious about the people and what it was like to be in India.
