Interviews with people who are actively using DITA.
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
One of my favorite technical communication conferences is LavaCon, hosted annually by its ebullient host and organizer Jack Molisani. I’ve been heading to them since at least 2015, and the location of the venues has always been fun (places like New Orleans and Las Vegas, to name a couple), and perhaps in part because ofRead More
I met Dawn Stevens many years ago, at my first Content Management Strategies/DITA North America conference. This was at a time when I was trying to learn more about DITA on behalf of the company I was working for. Even back in those early days Dawn was able to answer a lot of the questionsRead More
Earlier this year Ed Marsh of the techcomm-focused “Content Content Podcast” interviewed me as I rambled on about my quarter-century in Technical Communications. Ed is a great interviewer and this ended up being fun to do, which I hope comes across in the podcast. We talked about a wide range of topics, including my startRead 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
Sometimes it seems like you have to travel far in order to meet your neighbours. I had that experience recently went I went to the STC conference in Washington, D.C., and got reacquainted with “Single Sourceror” Rob Hanna of Precision Content, who lives in the same city that I do (Toronto). While I’ve known RobRead More
Not too long ago the second edition of the popular DITA for Print was published by XML Press. While she is a colleague of mine at IXIASOFT, she lives and works in the States and we don’t get the opportunity to meet and talk as much as I would like. Luckily, we had the opportunityRead More
Continuing from the previous article in this series, the interview with Don Day and Michael Priestley continues as we delve further into how a proto-DITA was developed within IBM, and the process that led to it being released to the open standards community via OASIS. DITAWriter: Could you tell me about the path that wouldRead More
As a way to celebrate what was the 10th anniversary of the DITA standard in 2015, I did a series of interviews with people who were there at the very beginning. Two of these key people were (and are) Don Day and Michael Priestley. Formerly with IBM, Don Day is now a DITA and XMLRead More
Recently I was made aware of a new online-based XML editor: Xeditor. Developed by appsoft, it is a web browser-based works XML that works with DITA and other XML standards. I was given a demo of the product by Anthony Apodaca and developer Thomas Werzmirzowsky, demonstrating to me that it is another potential tool contentRead More
