imis | Just Write Click

February 1, 2008 by annegentle

Find your user’s vocabulary and use his or her key terms as keywords

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 […]

October 26, 2007 by annegentle

Podcast about wikis with Tom Johnson at TechWriterVoices.com

Everyone, please give the TechWriterVoices.com site a look or two or three or more. It’s such a great site. I’m not just saying that because I have a podcast there now, Answering Tough Questions about Wikis – Anne Gentle, but because I do want to tell everyone what a great interviewer Tom Johnson is. Tom […]

September 5, 2007 by annegentle

Non-profit technology mashup with LOLcats

I found this image on the new lolnptech site, and the site gave me a good chuckle. The cat is saying “Oh noes! Manual waz written 4 geekz not social workerz!” This particular image hit home since I help write the manuals for iMIS. Typically our audience isn’t doing social work, necessarily, though. More likely […]

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 […]