I'm starting to lump together weekly posts into a theme but also include some other details. This isn't necessarily a bike journal (given the post title, you might think that), but the rides are sometimes more fun to document. Callie is learning to play the violin. She is still in the plucking stage, so she hasn't been taught the bow yet. She wanted to give up last week because she couldn't get the finger crawl method down with a pencil (it'...
I attended my first Write the Docs meetup last Thursday night in downtown San Francisco. It's interesting to compare Write the Docs with the STC. (I was downtown at an STC SF meeting just the previous month, if you recall from an earlier post.) What are my impressions? In general, the Write the Docs crowd is younger and more tech savvy. Many of them work for small companies or startups, and they may be the only writer or play a hybrid rol...
This post is brought to you by 34SP.com, a website hosting company made up from skilled hosting professionals who offer exceptional customer service and technical support. Note: I don't often publish guest posts from sponsors, but I think this essay provides a brief yet informative history of the tech comm profession that is worth reading. The Internet has revolutionised communication completely, but this is especially apparent in techni...
In Goodbye WordPress: 2014 Will Be the Year of the Flat-File CMS, Jeremiah Shoaf argues for the upcoming dominance of flat-file systems over database-driven sites such as WordPress. I found the post extremely interesting because I've been moving back and forth between flat-file systems and database systems with my DITA publishing strategies. There are compelling arguments for each side. On one hand, databases provide more capability to de...
Listen here: While I was at Information Development World, I had a conversation with Rick Yagodich about his new book, Author Experience. This is one of the first books in The Content Strategy series of books. During our conversation, Rick and I talked about the following topics: Why do people have such poor experiences with CMSs? What are key considerations authors need in a CMS? How important is it to see relationshi...
12/2/15 update: For more technical details on how to convert Markdown to HTML to DITA, see Convert Markdown to DITA in 20 seconds. The other day I started to organize my notes on Java, and knowing that I eventually plan to publish these notes, I wondered what format I should write the content in. My first thought was, hey, I wrote my DITA QRG in DITA, so why not store my Java notes in DITA as well? And then I had this nasty feeling of dre...
Lucy had an assignment to choose 7 pictures that demonstrate the timeline of her life. Although we didn't scour all every digital folder of pictures, here are 7 fun pictures of Lucy.
This morning Shannon and I left early (about 8am) for a ride up the San Francisco Bay Trail. We were planning to ride all the way into the city (i.e., San Francisco), but we got turned around a few times on the Bay trail, and it so happens that much of the Bay trail is gravel, so you can't go that fast on it. A couple of weeks ago I ordered a comprehensive map of the Bay trail, thinking it would be a perfect riding route. I didn't realize th...
I had the opportunity to attend Ed Marshall's API and SDK workshop at Information Development World. These are my notes. APIs versus SDKs SDKs are a set of tools that developers can use to make it easier to work with an API. Ed said that at one company, the SDK was a GUI tool of some kind that made it easier to interact with the company's API. (When I worked at Badgeville, our JavaScript SDK made it easy to work with the REST API through ...
Voiceover techniques 1.1 Finding a Conversational Voice in Video Tutorials 1.2 The Problem with Speaking Conversationally in Video Tutorials 1.3 Finding an acoustic environment (Voiceover) 1.4 Sounding natural (Voi...
I'm giving a presentation this week at Information Development World on voiceover with video tutorials. My presentation is Thursday at 2pm. Here's the description: Perfecting the Audio Narration with Instructional Videos No matter what tool you use to create video tutorials, getting the voice right — sounding professional, clear, and friendly — is an art. You have to know to interact with your microphone, how to read your script sounding...
The following is an interview with Jim Turcotte, a senior vice president for CA Technologies and business unit executive for the Information Services team. Jim recently posted several articles on LinkedIn Pulse about something he calls DocOps, so I asked him some follow-up questions. Can you explain DocOps in more detail? First, let me start by explaining the application economy. Customers today decide whether or not to do business with y...
Shannon and I rode an 18 mile loop across San Francisco (following the Wiggle route), through the Golden Gate park, around the coast to the Golden Gate Bridge, across the Bridge up to Sausalito, onto the Sausalito Ferry back to the Ferry Building at San Francisco. The ride is 18 miles long, not counting the distance the ferry covers. Here are some photos from the trip: (There are also a few photos in this album from the day before at the N...
We spent the weekend at Yosemite, camping two nights at "Housekeeping camp." Here are some pictures from the trip: I decided to start a log of what worked well and what didn't for each trip. From Lucy's point of view What worked well Playing in the lake -- wading in river, catching crawdads, climbing on the rocks under the bridge Sleeping in the beds in the housekeeping structures Seeing fat squirrels Riding bikes on the trails What could ...
Yesterday I presented "Publishing strategies for API documentation" to the San Francisco STC chapter. Here are my slides and recording. Listen here: Publishing strategies for API documentation from Tom Johnson PowerPoint in other format: pptx | zip Also, I know I posted it earlier, but here's the description of my presentation. Publishing strategies for API documentation Most of the common tools for publishing help ...
