Michael Priestley's blog

CMS/DITA North America, Day 1

Blog entry: Submitted by Michael Priestley on Tue, 2009-04-28 13:49.

A very interesting first day. Some quick notes:

DITA doclet - generate DITA API format docs from Java source

Blog entry: Submitted by Michael Priestley on Tue, 2009-03-10 18:14.

This article got published on developerWorks last month:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-DITAdoclet/

This should be of interest to anyone who has generated Javadoc in the past but wished they could get a more semantic, reprocessable format output instead. The doclet produces content using the DITA API specialization, which can be processed with the DITA Open Toolkit. Note that it includes the actual doclet code in the resources section, so you can try this yourself at home.

DITA User Clinic at UCSC - enroll before Jan 26

Blog entry: Submitted by Michael Priestley on Sun, 2009-01-18 20:29.

I'll be running a user clinic at UCSC with Elizabeth Wilde, from Feb 9th to March 15th. The basic idea of the clinic is to let existing DITA users share the details of their DITA deployment with other users, and get feedback both from each other and from the instructors, myself and Elizabeth Wilde.

Because of the nature of the course, in which each participant takes a turn at presenting their project, enrollment is very limited, although I think there are still some spots open. You can get more details here:

DITA visual editing in Eclipse with Vex

Blog entry: Submitted by Michael Priestley on Mon, 2008-11-24 00:00.

Just wanted to draw folks' attention to a new Eclipse project: Vex, a visual XML editor.

While they mention DITA as one of the goals for the project, I'm not sure that they have DITA skills currently on the contributing team, so I know they could use help.

If you're using Eclipse currently for DITA, or just like the idea of an open-source visual editor for DITA, I encourage you to go over and contribute your support in whatever way you can: encouragement, ideas, and most importantly the skills and time to help develop and document the new project.

DITA for Kids?

Blog entry: Submitted by Michael Priestley on Thu, 2008-10-09 18:48.

Imagine this scenario:

A teacher wants to create some customized lesson materials, starting from Wikipedia
They open an editor, type in the name of a wikipedia article, and start dragging and dropping content and images into a new article with just the content they want
They selectively combine and edit the content from several articles into new articles which can be organized around themes