just write click

Lisa Dyer and Alan Porter presented at last week’s DITA Central Texas User Group meeting, and both told tales of end-user doc written and sourced in DITA, with wikitext in mind as an output. About 20 people attended and we all enjoyed the show. I wanted to post my notes to follow up, and I’ll [...]

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Stewart Mader has created a series of videos available at www.ikiw.org/21days called 21 Days of Wiki Adoption.
Each video is short, encapsulated, and easily digested when you need a break. I’m really enjoying them, and the cool US map background behind Stewart.

Day 12 is Documentation. Great ideas there, involving authoring in the wiki and using the [...]

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Hey, that’s tomorrow! Sorry for the late post. I have reserved the Spicewood Springs library branch meeting room from 10-11AM Saturday February 23rd. I couldn’t get a weeknight reservation there, but we could work our way around north, central, and south pretty easily for future meetings. We’ll try it and see.

The library has a wireless [...]

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One reason why I like the show Dirty Jobs so much is because Mike Rowe, the host, is so respectful and honest about the work that people do each day. Dirty Jobs offers such a great viewpoint on work that is done each and every day. I recently discovered that Sarah Maddox, a technical writer [...]

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DITA for writers (content creators)
I just did a search on amazon.com for books for beginning technical writers and also to investigate what books are being written for our profession and for others wanting to start in our profession. I came across a book called Writing Software Documentation: A Task-Oriented Approach that suggests three categories for [...]

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Next week I’m presenting at the Alamo STC Chapter, giving a talk titled “A Technical Writer’s Role in Web 2.0 — Wiki-fy Your Doc Set.” It’s at the Igo Library in northwest San Antonio and you’ll want to refer to their website for directions. It’s Tuesday February 12th with the presentation starting at 7:00.
I plan [...]

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Most info architects agree - planning for reuse is harder than conditional text. But even conditional text can be difficult, especially if there are multiple conditions that overlap. The winner of the “most conditional text” contest was this commenter on my talk.bmc post with 64 conditions in a FrameMaker document.

Author-it has this to say about [...]

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I just used this “trick” to find out what job titles are relevant for some of the task analysis we’re doing while writing new materials. I think it helps you get into your user’s shoes and also realize the value that your software or hardware product brings to those who decide to become an expert [...]

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