Google’s Riona MacNamara presented at the Write The Docs North America conference on “Documentation, Disrupted: How Two Technical Writers Changed Google Engineering Culture“. In the video of the presentation below, Riona explains how she worked with a small team of writers and engineers to build a documentation platform in six months that is becoming a part of the… Read more »
Category: collaborative authoring
The big questions in technical communication
David Farbey wrote a semi-existentialist post on the challenges for technical communicators yesterday. I’d like to look at the issue in a different way, by looking at the big questions in technical communication today. The answers to these questions (which may be decided by people outside of the profession) are likely to affect the future… Read more »
The federated Help authoring system
The federated database is a term that has been growing in popularity in recent months. According to Wikipedia: Through data abstraction, federated database systems can provide a uniform user interface, enabling users and clients to store and retrieve data in multiple noncontiguous databases Could a similar approach be used in the field of technical authoring… Read more »
Book review: Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate
I was sent a review copy of Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate: A wiki as platform extraordinaire for technical communication, by Sarah Maddox. It’s about using wiki technology for developing and publishing technical documentation, using the Confluence platform, the emerging trends in the creation of User Assistance and, in places, chocolate. The book is aimed at three… Read more »
Six reasons why your wiki isn’t working
Wikis are a great way to create and publish documentation online, but there are many wikis that haven’t worked. They comprise just a few pages of incomplete, out of date information. Why is that? Why do some wikis work and others just fail? Here are six key reasons why: 1. The wiki isn’t managed A… Read more »