content strategy | Just Write Click

October 12, 2012 by annegentle

Tools and skills in the red

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 an easy popularity contest winner for “Technical Documentation” over “Technical Communication” with […]

September 22, 2012 by annegentle

Community Content Strategist

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 less any cookie cutting going on. But I think it’s needed. My request is that […]

July 20, 2010 by annegentle

Must Help Pages Live Forever?

I’m pondering the 1998 article, Pages Must Live Forever (from Jakob Nielson’s Alertbox) while documenting the content aging report in MindTouch 2010 (Read the spec here, read the user guide here). With redirects helping stave off link rot, it seems that we can fulfill the wish behind Kristina Halvorson’s plea not to allow the web […]

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 […]