One of the main challenges to embracing DITA is accepting the idea that tasks and concepts should be separated. However, despite the common assumption that concepts and tasks should live separately when you follow DITA, actually it's not the case. You can combine concepts and tasks in DITA's output through your ditamap. Additionally, you can even combine concepts and a single task in a "general task" dita topic. Tasks versus concepts Pret...
For about the past 6 months, I've been using Markdown syntax as a quick way to convert content to HTML and publish on Drupal, which is where we publish our help. But lately I've been feeling the pain of this process. Markdown is a lightweight markup somewhat like a wiki syntax. Any time I needed to do something more, like prepare a collection of more than 5+ files to publish at once, with cross-references between them, it's been a chore ...
January 25, 2014 Update: The API Workshop is totally full now. However, we may repeat it in the summer. Since moving to California, I've noticed there's a high demand for technical writer jobs involving API documentation, but there's not much in the way of instruction, resources, or other events that provide training with API documentation. When I mentioned this to some local STC chapter leaders, they encouraged me to find an API expert a...
As this is New Years time, I wanted to write about a goal that many make every year: the goal to lose weight. For technical writers and other IT professionals, staying fit and healthy can be a real challenge. We sit in desks and stare at computers all day, generally being as sedentary as can be. It's easy for our bodies to degenerate into unhealthy blobs. As a technical writer, physical activity is not the norm on the job. In fact, you ca...
Blogging makes short-form publishing (1,000 to 2,000 word articles) easy, but what if you want to go beyond that, writing long-form content with more substance? For example, what if you want to use a blog to write a book, or a series of essays focused on a particular topic? You could write longer posts, but longer posts don't work well online. Most people reading online tend to stay only several minutes on a page before clicking elsewhere...
Search engine optimization 1.0 How to Search Engine Optimize (SEO) Your Help Documentation 1.1 Introduction, frames, iframes, and tech comm tools (search engine optimization) 1.2 Single sourcing and duplicate content (search engine optimization) ...
A reader asks, I am a college student that is unsure of what I want to do when I "grow up." I previously thought that I wanted to work in human services, and although I still have the same drive to help those less fortunate I don't think that I want to make that my career. Besides raising a child and taking care of the house, which I think is a full-time job on its own, I also work outside of the home (I get to my school work some time be...
My Christmas wish list for Santa is now on techwhirl.com. You can read it at Dear Santa: Tom Johnson's Nearly Impossible Wish List. I'm not sure how practical it is, but I had a lot of fun making it. There are also quite a few wish lists from other tech comm people, such as Mark Baker, Kristina Halverson, Joann Hackos, Jack Molisani, and more. You can see the full list here.
Search engine optimization 1.0 How to Search Engine Optimize (SEO) Your Help Documentation 1.1 Introduction, frames, iframes, and tech comm tools (search engine optimization) 1.2 → Single sourcing and duplicate content (search engine optimization) ...
Search engine optimization 1.0 How to Search Engine Optimize (SEO) Your Help Documentation 1.1 → Introduction, frames, iframes, and tech comm tools (search engine optimization) 1.2 Single sourcing and duplicate content (search engine optimization) ...
I'm a flip-flopper when it comes to collapsible sections. Sometimes I think they're great, and other times I think they're problematic. A while ago I converted nearly all of my help's subheadings into collapsible sections. I trend toward longer help pages, and the collapsible heading sections seemed like a natural way to provide a kind of clickable TOC. Readers could see up-front all the sections on the page and go directly to the section...
On January 25, 2014, there's an unconference coming up in San Jose, California called TC Camp. Here's the description: TC Camp is an Unconference focused on Technical Communications issues, skills, challenges, and the various applications used by technical communicators. The purpose of TC Camp is to provide a local bay area conference for technical communicators that is driven by the members of that community–writers, editors, designers,...
For several years I've shown ads in my sidebar using the WP125 ad plugin. But I think readers tend to become blind to website ads like this, so I decided to switch things up a bit. If you look in my Sponsors section, you'll see snippets of text beside each graphic. Sponsors also have control to update the text and images themselves. I patterned this model after a section I saw on Techwr-l called “Sponsored Posts.” I found myself drawn to ...
The following is a guest post by Steve Goldberg. Steve is a technical writer and Confluence administrator working for a software company in London, UK. You can follow him on Twitter at @bergeroflondon. This post is written in a personal capacity of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of his employers. Atlassian's 2013 Summit saw the company announce a swathe of new features and updates for their products, namely Questio...
I was talking with a friend the other day when he mentioned that over the weekend he had crossed off a few items from his "bucket list." For this friend, those bucket items involved skydiving over the Pacific ocean and sleeping on the beach. (Well, those last two items are fictional, because I can't really write what the items were). But it got me thinking, what are the items on my bucket list? First, a bucket list is a list of achievemen...
