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
Late last year I did a presentation for the Boston DITA Users Group on the Future of DITA. December 2019 doesn’t seem that long ago, but so much has changed since the coming of Covid-19. Luckily I can continue to work from home, and I hope that many of my readers are able to doRead More
This has been a project I have been devoting time to for over the past year. It is a DITA-fied version of a full manual, in this case, a vintage, WWII-era pilot’s guide to the B-25 “Mitchell” bomber. You can find all of the DITA source files on GitHub, and there is an additional Markdown-DITARead More
For just shy of six years, I have been keeping track of the number of technical writer job postings on indeed.com—the largest job aggregator website in the United States. With the exception of a brief surge in technical writing job postings in late 2015/early 2016, there has been a steady decline in technical writer jobRead More
April 1, 2019 Somewhere in the depths of a content repository thought to reside in a high-volume data center in Punkeydoodles Corners, Ontario, a DITA XML-based spaghetti conref was looped back upon its own content enough times and become sentient. In what has been hailed by some baffled computer scientists as a significant, if confusing,Read More
I believe that one of the best ways people learn is to get “hands on” and play with things at the code level in order to get a real understanding as to how things are supposed to work. That’s the approach I took when devising a set of Lightweight DITA (LwDITA) code samples, which areRead 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
While I get a lot of conference invitations, I was particularly intrigued when I received an invitation out-of-the-blue to present at the SIGDOC 2017 conference in Halifax. SIGDOC (which stands for “Special Interest Group on Design of Communication”) is a conference hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and is considered to be primarilyRead More
I and some of my colleagues have run into a few people at recent conferences who have been asking me how soon DITA 2.0 was coming and whether they should hold off moving to DITA until its arrival. While I understand where this type of question is coming from, it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding asRead 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
