As I am finishing my seventh DITA Newsletter for posting today, I realize that I must get someone to help me produce this monthly snapshot of upcoming meetings and events, and snippets of important DITA News announcements.

We might be able to pay you a small amount for each newsletter. It's a small amount of tech writing.

If you like to keep in touch with what's happening in DITA and could edit and post a monthly template, I'd like to hear from you.

Email me at editor@cmsreview.com or bobdoyle@skybuilders.com. 

Read more

When I started as a technical writer, in the pre-PC days, most work was in what was called the engineering field. I mainly worked with aircraft manuals, but also with manuals relating to other engineering areas, such as buses, ships, and buildings. We produced hand-written manuscripts, which were typed, reviewed, typeset, laid out, reviewed, and finally printed.

Read more

The first teleconference meeting of the DITA Help subcommittee was held on Thursday/Friday last week. (That's Thursday in the US and Europe, and Friday in Australia and Asia.) The group has excellent experience across a broad range of fields, but all have in common an enthusiasm to make DITA a viable Help authoring environment. The first meeting broadly discussed goals and scope, but from now on we have to become more focussed on the actions we need to take!

We have a new DITA blogroll page on the DITA.XML.org Focus Area, and while it no doubt improves the findability for DITA resources, it does raise questions of information architecture for DITA.XML.org and other sites supporting DITA.

We have a main Blogs section on the home page. It would be good if someone clicking on that link found a link to the new DITA Blogroll.

Read more

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has gone live with it's new Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) Web site, a DITA-based application that provides all of the U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Procedures (GAAP) standards through dynamic delivery of DITA-based content.

I have written up a deeper discussion of the project here: http://blog.reallysi.com/2008/01/live-dita-appli.html

The ASC site itself is here: http://asc.fasb.org/home

Read more