Update: It’s been a couple of months since my last post, and there is now solid evidence that we are in a downturn for technical writer job postings. This is not a huge surprise, given all of the recent economic woes making the news. It also matches what I am hearing from others about variousRead More
This is the first in a series of pieces that examine trends in the technical writing job market over the past decade. Long-time readers of this blog will know I have been keeping track of technical writer job postings from Indeed.com for a while now. Indeed.com was the first job aggregator website and has beenRead More
While I will not be there in person at this year’s ConVEx 2022 conference in Tempe, AZ, I will be doing a couple of virtual presentations. The first is called “From Papyrus to the Virtual Elephants in Rooms” that I will be doing with co-presenter Jo Lam. The scope of this presentation looks at howRead More
Here’s something that seems have slipped under most people’s radar: a preliminary 2.0 release of the DITA Toolkit. Called a “milestone” build, this version of the DITA is the first reveal of what looks like a significant code revamp, at least when it comes to XSL processing, moving to the XSL 2.0 standard. According toRead More
I don’t normally report on “dot dot” releases here, since the changes to any program at this level tends to be minor, but when it has been almost a year since the last significant update, I figure it is worth a mention here. On November 23rd Leximation released an update (v.1.1.17) to their popular FrameMakerRead More
Seemingly appropriate for Cyber Monday, here’s another interesting survey from the folks at CIDM that focuses on how firms are incorporating social media into their user documentation (or not). Again, not DITA-specific, but of real interest to anyone who is working with technical communications these days. Here’s a link to the survey. Here’s the blurbRead More
In a presentation I gave a couple of years ago, I talked about how I found some user-generated content that ended up helping me far more than the user manual did to solve a problem I was having with my washing machine. The user-generated content was more to the point and helped me diagnose theRead More
I had the opportunity last week of getting a preview of a new product that Samalander Software is planning to release today: DITA Xref Manager. Designed for small technical writing teams who are working without the benefit of a Content Management System (CMS), it automatically checks the validity of all xrefs contained within a ditamapRead More
Time to catch up on some DITA-related news items, all having to do with upcoming DITA-related webinars: Content Management Trends: Understanding DITA Date: August 14th at 1PM-2PM EDT Speakers: Dan Taylor, Paul Wlodarczyk and Kris Eberlein More companies are utilizing DITA standards to represent reusable content components. A component content model enables companies to efficientlyRead More
Sometimes there’s a flood of information that is DITA-related that happens all at the same time. Today just happens to be one of those days. Here’s a quick run-through of some DITA items of note: Book Release: DITA Metrics 101 Mark Lewis’ new DITA Metrics 101 book was officially launched at the Intelligent Content conferenceRead More
