Archives for April 2007

April 25, 2007 by annegentle

A whole new way to look at book maps

Nope, not DITA book maps for once. Instead, maps of locations mentioned in a book. How neat is this – Google Books lets you visualize the places mentioned in a fiction book in a map. For example, The Travels of Marco Polo becomes so much more real when you see a visual map of the […]

April 20, 2007 by annegentle

Wikis for technical documentation, one writer’s story

An interview with Emily Kaplan, a technical writer and former co-worker of mine, who maintains a wiki for Motorola A good friend of mine, Emily Kaplan, was kind enough to let me interview her via email to find out more about her experience with managing a wiki for technical documentation. She writes for the Motorola […]

April 18, 2007 by annegentle

Transforming coins into donations using technology

I’m impressed when technology is used to transfer loose change into donations to charity I’m in the Sunnyvale BMC office this week, and I’m learning a lot about Configuration Management and how IT departments can manage desktops and servers, automatically sending patches and updates. I’m trying to put myself in the role of an IT […]

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 […]