Archives for September 2006

September 14, 2006 by annegentle

Turning information into DITA topics

What would you do to make this particular type of content into topics? I’ve been looking at content at BMC and determining whether it belongs in a concept, reference, or task topic using DITA’s definition of a topic. I had one particular item that seemed like it could be arranged in several different ways with […]

September 12, 2006 by annegentle

Reports and proposals in technical publications

Plus a description of what a technical writer does through an interview with a technical communication student from Miami University I got an interesting query from Matt, a student at Miami University in Ohio, where I received my master’s degree in Scientific and Technical Communication (MTSC). Miami University also has an excellent bachelor’s degree program […]

September 7, 2006 by annegentle

How to substitute your custom CSS when using DITA Open Toolkit transforms

When you want to use the DITA Open Toolkit transforms but you want to use your own CSS, here’s how to substitute your CSS for HTML Help (CHM) Here’s how I was able to substitute my own CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) file when using the DITA transforms to make compiled help files (CHM). I did […]

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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 […]