Deep in DITA land

Still chugging away in DITA-writing mode; still having fun in terms of the intellectual underpinnings....


....But at times, the sad state of DITA tool implementation gets to me; I wish the tools were 'transparent' and allowed me to focus on content, but often they get in the way with interaction design right out of the 1980s. For example, this popup in our Content Management System as been a thorn in my side recently (C'mon, everyone hates popups, and I know I made a change; you don't need to tell me! Especially when you don't offer an 'undo' function, and when you popup silently in multiple windows, forcing me to hunt through them all till I can resume my work...):

Fun with DITA rewrites

When I look back at the last 2 years as a tech writer, the moments in which I've had the most fun have been when

• I wrote a Python or Javascript tool to automate some documentation task...and it works! and colleagues adopt it, grassroots style!
• I rewrote a bunch of old crusty content for minimalism in DITA and shared/structured the heck out of it...without much developer input. 'Cause I understood it!

Most recently I'm have fun with rewriting some hardware help for DITA. Since the hardware specs are already in DITA, I was able to single-source between them, plus turn a bunch of essays about hardware implementation into really terse tables. yay!