How to create online Help topics that are editable by clients

In the Agile Technical Writers forum on LinkedIn, one of its members posted this question: “I need to create an contextual online help for an complex web tool (ok, that´s not that hard). The customer must be able to add some specific job instructions to this online help by himself. The customer part must not be overridden when the… Read more »

Do you need DITA?

Judging by Social Media last week, there were many strong opinions at the tekom tcworld conference towards the DITA authoring standard and the associated tools. It seemed, as the philosopher Swift once said, “Haters gonna hate”, and, by inference, “Hypers gonna hype”. Eliot Kimber provided an interesting summary in a post to the DITA users group forum (Trip… Read more »

Updates to our DITA elearning course

We’ve updated the video recordings in our online DITA course, and today (28th March) we’re uploading the new recordings to our learning area. This means the course will be down for a short while today.

Ted Nelson on the future of text

Mike Atherton, Lead Instructor at General Assembly London, tweeted a link to a 2011interview with Ted Nelson on the future of text, document abstraction and transclusion. Ted Nelson is one of the pioneers of information technology. He has been credited as being the first person to use the words hypertext and hypermedia (although he denies this), transclusion and… Read more »

Writing troubleshooting topics

It’s a fair bet that the introduction of the new Troubleshooting information type into the DITA 1.3 technical authoring standard will affect how all Technical Authors write troubleshooting topics, regardless of whether they use DITA or not. That’s because the proposed elements for troubleshooting topics make good sense, and it offers a standardised approach to writing… Read more »