Pick a beat for release notes

{ Posted on Jan 23 2012 by annegentle }
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Categories : techpubs, wiki, writing
This is fun. Fedora has "beat writers" which harken to journalists tracking a story. Each beat is a section in the release notes. I found it while poking around on the Fedora wiki pages that describe how they do documentation. ...Read More »

From Cement to Spandex – Making PDF and ePub

{ Posted on Dec 02 2011 by annegentle }
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Categories : techpubs, tools, work, writing
Which statement is true: "PDFs are like cement." or "Gentlemen prefer PDF." Turns out both are true! See my recent OpenStack blog entry, Hacking on Ebooks, for more context and attributions for those statements. We recently held a hackathon which I blogged about earlier to ...Read More »

DocBook, ePub, Hackathon, What More Could You Ask For?

{ Posted on Nov 09 2011 by annegentle }
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Categories : tools, work, writing
This Friday, on 11/11/11, the Austin Rackspace office is holding a Hackathon. The projects range from "fix the arcade game" to "install notification system to indicate availability of the men's room" to my pet hack project, "create epub output for ...Read More »

Fabric Welding and Costume Making

{ Posted on Nov 02 2011 by annegentle }
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Categories : writing
At Rackspace we get these great email threads due to an email list designated for "fun" at each core location. One of these such email threads started with a guy asking if any other guys do sewing - and wondering ...Read More »

Google Summer of Code Doc Summit Stories

{ Posted on Oct 21 2011 by annegentle }
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Categories : social media
On my way to the airport after an intense and enjoyable three day session with four open source projects writing a book apiece, I wonder if I have any more words to write down. The group I worked with had ...Read More »

Wiki Best Practices from Wikia Content Team

{ Posted on Oct 16 2011 by annegentle }
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I found this great set of best practices for wikis on the Wikia site. They host 275,000 wiki sites on all sorts of topics, and truly want to help people reach the most potential with their wiki by offering guidance. ...Read More »

Docs in 2031

{ Posted on Oct 11 2011 by annegentle }
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I like to think about the future of documentation, ruminating on future processes, interactions, and tools. Yet this past week at the OpenStack Conference I was faced with the reality of the future of documentation as a storage device for ...Read More »

Why Wiki?

{ Posted on Sep 28 2011 by annegentle }
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Categories : techpubs, wiki
In OpenStack-land, the wiki was chosen before I got here. It has a couple of flaws for my vision for open source documentation, which became more apparent when I recently outlined my reasoning for what content goes where. By walking ...Read More »

Social Support and Documentation Communities

{ Posted on Jul 14 2011 by annegentle }
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Categories : social media, techpubs, tools
Stories of Social Media Sticking in Unlikely Places Saying, "No one reads the manual" just doesn't hold water any more. Social technology has intersected even the classic user manual. There's always someone who will read a book. But their true motivation ...Read More »

Observations from the Open Help Conference

{ Posted on Jun 09 2011 by annegentle }
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Categories : techpubs, tools, wiki, work, writing
I attended the Open Help Conference in lush, green, over-20-inches-of-rain Cincinnati over the weekend and learned so much. I wanted to share my observations in a longer format than the 140 characters I used sporadically during the conference. First of all, ...Read More »
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