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Documentation as Conversation with CSS

{ Posted on May 22 2013 by annegentle }

Categories : content strategy, techpubs, tools, writing

Three types of speech balloons: speech, thought, scream. I love to explore new ways of conveying technical information, and I'm interested in documentation as conversation. Last year I wanted to convey a "side note" on each page of a Sphinx ...Read More »

Who Wrote OpenStack Grizzly Docs?

{ Posted on Apr 26 2013 by annegentle }

No Comments

Tags : openstack
Categories : techpubs, tools, writing

Sneaking a peek at the numbers for documentation along with the code should show us pointers about docs keeping up with code. As I suspected, there were about three major contributors to the operations manuals that span all the projects, ...Read More »

How It’s Made: the OpenStack API Reference Page

{ Posted on Apr 14 2013 by annegentle }

2 Comments

Tags : openstack
Categories : community, techpubs, tools, work, writing

Glad you asked! The site at http://api.openstack.org is a collection of HTML pages, and one page has an especially interesting story about how it is built. The http://api.openstack.org/api-ref.html page provides a listing of all the API calls for all OpenStack ...Read More »

Developers, Writers, and First Jobs

{ Posted on Apr 08 2013 by annegentle }

4 Comments

Tags : content, technical writing, techpubs
Categories : techpubs, writing

I constantly try to network locally with Austinites, and I'm meeting more tech writers with diverse backgrounds. One of Austin's slogans is "Keep Austin Weird" and while our writers aren't necessarily weird, their backgrounds can be! For example, I know of ...Read More »

Tools and skills in the red

{ Posted on Oct 12 2012 by annegentle }

3 Comments

Tags : content, content strategy, techcomm
Categories : content strategy, techpubs, work, writing

If this isn't a snapshot of our industry, I don't know what is. A couple of observations: "Documentations" [sic] to me indicates an English-second-language speaker. Members listing that term as a skill is 245K, larger than the 107K "Technical Documentation". Looks like it's ...Read More »

Community Content Strategist

{ Posted on Sep 22 2012 by annegentle }

1 Comment

Tags : community, content, content curator, content management, content strategy
Categories : community, techpubs, work, writing

I'm considering a request. It's a request for a new branch in content strategy. Now it's odd to even start such a fork when content strategy itself is so new, so nascent that its molds are barely even formed much ...Read More »

Open Help Conference 2012 Introduces igor

{ Posted on Aug 12 2012 by annegentle }

1 Comment

Categories : techpubs, tools, writing

I'm at the Open Help Conference in Cincinnati this weekend. Yesterday Florian Nadge from RedHat gave a lovely talk about Writing for Translation. Next up was Warren Block, longtime FreeBSD contributor, Automating Documentation Proofreading What tests of your doc can be automated? ...Read More »

What’s New in Conversation and Community?

{ Posted on Aug 03 2012 by annegentle }

7 Comments

Tags : book conversation community edition update reorganization revision addition
Categories : social media, techpubs, tools, wiki, writing

Love this new cover, both photos are Creative Commons licensed once again. Let's look between the covers though! While thinking about the second edition and how three years had passed, I was pleasantly surprised that we could get to the three ...Read More »

Facebook for Social Support? I like.

{ Posted on Jun 01 2012 by annegentle }

3 Comments

Tags : cloud, Facebook, openstack, social support, trystack
Categories : community, social media, writing

When we first rolled out TryStack, a place for trying out cloud! for OpenStack, we heard the groans from the audience since our first ID check is through a Facebook login. No Facebook, no TryStack. But since we've worked through ...Read More »

Best Twitter Account Idea Yet from The Information

{ Posted on May 02 2012 by annegentle }

4 Comments

Categories : social media, writing

You know how all these bizarre yet entertaining Twitter accounts keep popping up? The character-based Mad Men account, @BettyDraper the one quoting his hilarious father (with the not-censored four-letter-word-in-the-title), the FakeSteveJobs account, and how about this insane spam one, @horse_ebooks, ...Read More »