I did an interview recently with Sarah O’Keefe from Scriptorium, where I talked about the current state of the technical writing job market. This comes as a result of my pouring over a decade’s worth of technical writer job posting data. This is now available as a podcast, and works as a good companion pieceRead More
A few years ago I was at the DITA North America conference just when the idea of Lightweight DITA was being floated for the first time at a conference. One of the speakers I met for the first time was Professor Carlos Evia, Ph.D., who co-presented with Michael Priestley and Jenifer Schlotfeldt from IBM onRead More
One of the final technical communications conferences in the fall is the biggest: tcworld which draws in over 4,000 attendees, mostly from Germany and across Europe. I came to the conference with some trepidation given that, last year, DITA experts and vendors attending the show got a largely frosty reception, with German CCMS vendors bonding togetherRead More
[This blog post was originally published on the IXIASOFT website on November 19, 2015. It is reproduced here with permission] 1. tcworld is the largest technical communications conference in the world Actually I knew this fact when heading over to Stuttgart, Germany, but it really only hit home when I first saw the conference hall.Read More
One of the great things about YouTube (other than numerous videos of cats) is that if you are looking to learn more about a subject—like DITA XML—there’s plenty of material available for you. George Bina at SyncRO Soft recently sent me a link to several DITA and oXygen-related videos posted online, and I realized thatRead More
Summer is here and what better time to learn more about DITA XML? 😉 Okay, maybe that’s not for everyone, but this series of webinars hosted by easyDITA look to be an interesting way to while away a lunchtime. Unfortunately I came into this information a bit late (busy with work!), but there are aRead More
The following is a (hopefully) comprehensive list of all DITA XML-related videos being hosted on YouTube and Vimeo. As you can see there’s plenty of videos on all sorts of DITA-related topics out there, ranging from how to use DITA in various editors (including FrameMaker, oXygen and XMetaL), tutorials on DITA, a few DITA-based CMSesRead More
I received word over the weekend that the folks at Alan Pringle were now shipping “Content Strategy 101”. It was written by Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle. Subtitled “Transform Technical Content into a Business Asset”, the book’s brief blurb is: “Technical content is often the last in line for investment and innovation, but poor contentRead More
A nice four-part presentation (PowerPoint slide deck plus running commentary) on the basics of DITA by Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium. The whole thing runs about 40 minutes total and is good intro to the topic. One of the things I particularly like comes up in the second part where O’Keefe focuses on DITA’s niche inRead More
