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My upcoming 2016 STC Summit workshop and presentation

by Tom Johnson on Dec 22, 2015 •
categories: api-doc jekylltechnical-writing

I'm going to be giving a workshop on API documentation and a presentation about Jekyll at the STC Summit in Anaheim, California in May.

My API workshop will more or less follow the same content as my API doc course. This content is online and available right now.

For my presentation on Jekyll, here’s the presentation title and description:

Writing tech docs like a hacker with Jekyll

Static site generators are a new breed of documentation tools that are much more common in engineering groups where developers contribute to the documentation.

Jekyll is one of the most popular static site generators, but it is highly similar to others in the same category such as Docpad, Middleman, Wintersmith, and Octopress. You can see a more comprehensive list of the top static site generators at Staticgen.com.

Jekyll projects approach doc as code. All the files are open and editable within a code editor, and your files can live in the same repository as your program code or within the same version control workflow.

Although developers and web engineers love Jekyll, there are significant challenges to overcome when adopting Jekyll for any robust tech comm publishing scenario. Some of these challenges include conditional filtering, single sourcing, PDF output, a robust TOC, search, context-sensitive help, collaboration, SME review, and more.

In this presentation, I’ll share my adventures in using Jekyll and how I dealt with each of these challenges.

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The 2016 STC Summit will be held in Anaheim, California on May 15-18.

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About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm a technical writer / API doc specialist based in the Seattle area. In this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, visual communication, information architecture, writing techniques, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation if you're looking for more info about that. If you're a technical writer and want to keep on top of the latest trends in the field, be sure to subscribe to email updates. You can also learn more about me or contact me. Finally, note that the opinions I express on my blog are my own points of view, not that of my employer.

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