I've started a new social network for content professionals, The Content Wrangler Community. It's a place where technical, science, medical and marketing writers, editors, information architects, translators, indexers, content managers, taxonomists, and information technology professionals of all flavors can find and share information.

The network already boasts nearly 600 members (in just 2 days) who have started groups including:

Read more

Until a few weeks ago, I was unaware that there was a company employing some 200 technical writers just two kilometres from where I teach technical communication in Melbourne, Australia.  Likewise, a manager at the company was unaware that my university provided post-graduate education in technical communication. We were operating in two parallel universes. The company involved operates in the "engineering technical publications" field, which seems to be quite separate (and isolated) from the "IT and corporate technical communication" field.

Read more

"Airplane Help" describes a technique whereby locally installed Help and server-based Help are integrated, so that a software application user is presented with server Help if he or she has an Internet connection, or local Help if not. The advantage of this approach is that the most current version of the Help is displayed if possible, but at least some form of Help is displayed when the user is "offline". Can DITA play a role in delivering Airplane Help?

Read more

We coordinated and recorded a remote presentation by Nenad Furtula and Jim Tivy of Bluestream speaking to the Silicon Valley Digital Interest Group on February 13.

From their Bluestream offices in Vancouver they described working with DITA and their XDocs CMS.

We recorded their demonstration in Cambridge, MA using Elluminate.

You can download this Flash presentation from:

www.ditausers.org/tutorials/cms/xdocs/

We hope you enjoy this and the dozens of other tutorial presentations at DITA Users.

Read more

Eliot Kimber presented his Specialization in Real Time Tutorial at our Boston DITA Users Group

He created a topic specialization for a valentine!

Eliot has given his real-time specialization tutorial to DITA user groups in Austin, TX and Boulder, CO, and now Boston.

We videotaped Eliot. You can see the video at media.skybuilders.com/DITA/KimberSpecialization/. Unfortunately our camcorder had a lot of problems with the color.

Read more