troubleshooting | Just Write Click

February 13, 2008 by annegentle

Can DITA train writers? Or does it require too much programming?

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 […]

November 29, 2007 by annegentle

Q and A about Author-it and DITA – guest post from Mike Stockman

I read this recent conversation on the author-it-users Yahoo Group with interest. I haven’t had a need to author DITA topics with Author-it, so I have to rely on others for information on how it works. With Mike Stockman’s and Tony Watkin’s permission, I’ve written their Q&A as a blog entry. Tony: What are your […]

November 16, 2007 by annegentle

Something old, something new – design patterns

I’m feeling a little late to the party of patterns that I’ve been reading about lately, but after attending Michael Hughes’ STC webinar presentation “Pattern Language as a Workshop Management Tool” where we saw patterns for user assistance, and we were really intrigued by an internal wiki page he pulled up giving DITA patterns to […]

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 […]