Archives for May 2006

May 31, 2006 by annegentle

Defining OPML and relating to DITA maps

I found a nice definition for OPML from whatis.com as their word of the day, and I’m starting to wonder about similarities between OPML and DITA maps From an information design perspective, OPML is a great format for outlining information, showing information’s hierarchical structure and relationship to other entries. I had only really thought about […]

May 25, 2006 by annegentle

MS-DOS tips for time and date stamps

How to make zip files and folders with a formatted date and time stamp as the folder name in a DOS batch file automatically We have a help rendition system internally, where all we writers do is create the source files needed to make CHM files (HHK, HHC, HHP, HTML), zip up the HTML source […]

May 23, 2006 by annegentle

SplunkBase – tag your IT

A wiki as a technical information repository, for sysadmins by sysadmins Cote passed along SplunkBase to me a while back as an example of a wiki that houses technical information, and it looks like Slashdot got a hold of SplunkBase early in April with SplunkBase Brings IT Troubleshooting Wiki to the Masses. I had challenged […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about developer support at Cisco recently, especially for the way the world works today with multiple cloud providers. This post is a re-publish of my talk from over five years ago, but the techniques and tools for listening and helping others are still true today. At Rackspace, we watched several […]

Cisco DevNet is our developer program for outreach, education, and tools for developers at Cisco. From the beginning, the team has had a vision for how to run a developer program. Customers are first, and the team implements what Cisco customers need for automation, configuration, and deployment of our various offerings. Plus, the DevNet team […]

I had a great talk with Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf Technical Writing consulting last week. Here are the show notes, full of links to all the topics we covered. Podcasts are great fun to listen to and participate in, if a bit nerve-wracking to think on your feet and make sure you answer questions succinctly […]

At the beginning of this year, I worked hard to summarize my thoughts on API documentation, continuous publishing, and technical accuracy for developer documentation. The result is an article on InfoQ.com, edited by Deepak Nadig, who also was forward-thinking in having me speak to a few teams at Intuit about API documentation coupled with code. Always […]