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
Current Practices and Trends in Technical and Professional Communication was published earlier this week in the U.K. by ISTC. Edited by Professor Stephen Crabbe, it is a book that surveys the current state of technical authoring. I was asked to contribute a chapter to the publication, which focused on DITA. My chapter is called “TheRead More
I will be covering all of the points in this article and more in a webinar presentation on DITA and SEO at CIDM’s online IDEAS Summer Online Conference on July 25, 2017. I hope to see you there! There’s a joke making the rounds that goes like this: where is the best place to hideRead More
