One challenge I’ve recently been considering is how to handle content re-use on a web content management system, such as Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, or some other web platform. Let’s say you’re writing about ACME widgets and have three different audiences: ACME developers, ACME sales people, and ACME administrators. All your help content is hosted on Continue Reading »
I recently listened to the Scriptorium webinar on the State of Tech Comm, which I found well-worth my time. One theme I keep hearing is a trend toward structured authoring. In Scott Abel‘s benchmarking survey (which the webinar uses as a starting point), Scott found that 44% of companies are using structured XML content, with Continue Reading »
In my previous post, Do Short Topics Make Information More Findable, I argued that shorter topics make it more difficult for users to find information. I ended the post by saying that topics that are more substantial make content more findable. But how big should the topics be? Obviously not the length of a book, Continue Reading »
In my last post, which now has more than 80 comments, I noted that authoring with DITA seemed to encourage authors to create a lot of little topics. DITA experts chimed in to say DITA doesn’t constrain users with topic length in their outputs — authors can combine topics as needed. However, one commenter noted that short Continue Reading »
I’m currently exploring the possibility of authoring content in DITA (using a tool such as easyDITA), publishing to an HTML web help output (through the DITA Open Toolkit), and then importing the output into Drupal (through some Python scripts someone has created). This sounds like a good workflow to me, but I’ve kind of run Continue Reading »
Why is it that writing can start out clear and organized, with a coherent logic and order, but then progress toward fragmentation, disarray, and messiness? How do you move from an ordered content system to an unordered content system? The movement towards disorganization describes the natural direction of many things. Our houses get messy each week Continue Reading »
In my previous post, I wrote about how handy collapsing and expanding sections can be. Although there are several plugins that enable this functionality, it’s pretty easy to create this functionality yourself from scratch. JSfiddle.net is a neat site that lets you play around with JavaScript, separating out the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and result into Continue Reading »
After my post on Organizing Page-Level Content, a couple of people asked me about the usability of collapsible sections, also known as content toggles or dropdown hotspots. These are sections that are collapsed upon initial display and then expand when clicked. Here’s an example: [toggle title_open=”Read this content” title_closed=”Read this content” hide=”yes” border=”yes” style=”default” excerpt_length=”0″ Continue Reading »
One of the topics I haven’t covered is how to organize content within the same page. If your topics become long and look more like Wikipedia pages, you will have a lot of content to organize — potentially twenty different sections on the page, including both tasks and concepts. What’s the best way to organize Continue Reading »
I spent the past week in California, interviewing with various companies. In preparation for each interview, I studied each company’s documentation as best I could. I noticed two main trends. Some companies group all their documentation together into one massive site. The sites usually have a robust table of contents and include help for most Continue Reading »