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
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
Though late to the party, Adobe finally got around to doing a full revamp of FrameMaker, bolting on DITA functionality starting with version 7.2, and then fully integrated by version 8 in 2007. Here are some resources for those looking to using FrameMaker with DITA: FrameMaker 8 Deep Dive: though it takes a while toRead 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
