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I recently spoke at an event held by the Electronic Publishing Specialist Group of the British Computer Society on "Structure and Evolution in Technical Publishing". This event, held on 15th July 2008 at the BCS in Southampton Street (Covent Garden) in central London, looked at XML and DITA in practice. I was invited to speak at this event alongside Noz Urbina of Mekon Systems, and the slides from my presentation are now available (PDF download).
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Dannywell Ltd. is now the UK Authorised Reseller for DITA Exchange. DITA Exchange is a complete, web-based, content collaboration platform for small, medium and large companies and organizations everywhere, based on Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 and the DITA open standard. DITA Exchange is developed by Content Technologies ApS of Denmark. See our DITA Exchange page or email me to find out more.
I will of course be continuing my work as an independent technical communications and information design consultant alongside my work with DITA Exchange.
I have enjoyed a long relationship with Microsoft Word for Windows, and I would describe myself as a reluctant admirer. As a heavy-duty user of Word, I understand that I am not using it in the way it was designed to be used, so I have modified my expectations accordingly. As well as my expectations, I have also learned to modify some of Word’s default settings so that I can have a little more control over its behaviour. As I have recently started working with Word 2007, I am going to describe some my my favourite tweaks – the adjustments that I make to disable my unfavourite features in Word 2003, and what the equivalent adjustments are in Word 2007. Read the rest of this article...
Read my latest newsletter (PDF file)
Download the slides from my introduction to DITA presentation, given at a meeting of the Electronic Publishing specialist group of the British Computer Society (15th July 2008).
Whenever a recruiter or an HR department advertises a new vacancy they generally get inundated by CVs (sometimes known as “résumés”). But the truth is that most CVs go straight into the bin, as they don’t pass the first stage of filtering. David Farbey has been a technical writer for the last 14 years, and has also worked as a specialist recruitment consultant. In this article David gives some hints on how to keep your CV out of the bin when you apply for a job. This article is based on a presentation David gave at the STC Summit in Philadelphia in June 2008. Read more...
This article on leadership was published in the July-August 2008 issue of Tieline, the newsletter for STC leaders.
There is an aspect of leadership that's just as important as knowing how to resolve conflicts. That is knowing when and how to listen. If we are leading a chapter or a SIG or a Society-level committee and one of our members raises an issue, we need to listen very carefully to what they have to say. Read more...
Read my blog at The Blockhead Blog or click the icon to subscribe to the RSS feed for more articles and comments on the world of technical communications and the professional life of a technical writer and all-round linguaphile.
KIDMM is a BCS initiative that allows professionals from a wide range of specialities to share their experiences in managing information and to learn from each other. In this report on the KIDMM MetaKnowledge Mash-Up that took place in September 2007, published on the STC UK Chapter web site, I give some background to KIDMM, and explain why technical communicators should be taking an interest in it.
My article, "Who's going to write the User's Guide?" was published in the Annual Review of the British Computer Society for 2007. In it, I addressed some of the common excuses put forward for not dealing seriously with user documentation.
Here's an extract:
There comes a time when every software development manager has to find an answer to the question "who's going to write the User's Guide?" ... in many small and medium-sized enterprises the User's Guide question often becomes a problem that everyone tries to ignore.
In the last dozen years as a technical writer in the software industry I have heard a whole range of excuses as to why the User's Guide question is not important. None of the arguments put forward stands up to close scrutiny....
You can read the full text of the article on the BCS web site.
No-one who has taken an interest in developments in technical publications over the last few years, and certainly no-one who has followed the themes of recent meetings of the STC UK Chapter, can have failed to hear about the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, or DITA. DITA was at the heart of many presentations at the X-Pubs Conference 2006, which I attended on 20th and 21st June 2006 at the Gatwick Hilton. The conference was arranged and managed by Mekon Ltd.)
The conference was addressed by many of the world's leading experts on content management, XML publications technology, and DITA, including Ann Rockley, Scott Abel, Michael Priestley, and JoAnn Hackos. And it was JoAnn Hackos who, in her closing keynote address, made the assertion that "DITA changes everything". This is a challenging and provocative statement, and it sounds a little familiar: haven't we been told before that this or that new technology was going to change the face of technical documentation, only to find out that in fact it was just a passing fad? Despite my innate cynicism, I came away from the X-Pubs Conference believing that Hackos may be right, and that DITA technology is really significant.
It was clear from the breadth of practical experience that the various conference speakers reported on that DITA is no longer the preserve of the geeks on the bleeding edge of content reuse, but it is entering into the technical publications mainstream. And it was equally clear from both the commercial presentations and the vendor exhibition that there are now a variety of products available that can support technical authors and content managers who want to start implementation.
Although DITA is now a publicly maintained standard, it was first developed and used at IBM, where staff from both hardware and software development groups worked together on developing an XML architecture that would support their document publishing needs. The strength of DITA's architecture derives from the two facets which, borrowed from evolutionary biology, put the word "Darwin" into its name: inheritance and specialisation. Michael Priestley from IBM (one of the authors of the DITA 1.0 specification) described how specialisation works in DITA, and Ian Larner, also from IBM, described how DITA was being used in hundreds of projects across the company.
To read the rest of this article see the June 2006 Newsletter of the STC UK Chapter
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