Archives for June 2006

June 30, 2006 by annegentle

Controversial ITIL blog asks the reality check questions

Taking a look at the ITIL Skeptic and his links I stumbled across The ITIL Skeptic’s blog today, reading on digg.com. An entry about the seeming impossibility of creating and maintaining a useful CMDB (Configuration Management Database) as defined by ITIL was an interesting read. But I suppose one answer is, don’t make it a […]

June 27, 2006 by annegentle

How much markup is enough for a wiki?

The answer is, it depends I noticed that the MSDN wiki for Visual Studio has just three markup tags for content edits. It appears you get basically three tags: heading, body, and code. Now, in their case, they have strictly defined what they intend for users to enter in their wiki, which is intended to […]

June 23, 2006 by annegentle

Troubleshooting tip for the DITA Open Toolkit installation

Finally figured out the fix for my DITA Open Toolkit “resource/messages.xml” not found error Thanks to David Brainard for figuring out the basic problem! At BMC, we all have a Documentum client installed on our desktops, so with the 4i client, my Classpath contained C:\Program Files\Documentum\Shared\dfc.jar. Apparently there is a collision of some sort between […]

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 […]