Tuesday, March 24, 2015

...Wait, there are alternatives to DITA for small companies?

I'm really excited to follow Tom Johnson's upcoming series on structured authoring in DITA vs. Jekyll at http://idratherbewriting.com/2015/03/23/new-series-jekyll-versus-dita/.

When Tom first started writing about reusing static content with Jekyll ( http://idratherbewriting.com/2015/02/27/static-site-generators-start-to-displace-online-cmss/) he kind of blew my mind. I'd gotten the impression that for writers at small companies/startups, there weren't any really good content reuse technologies out there. But the templates Tom authored looks super slick!

In fact those templates stand in stark contrast to my own experiences tinkering with the DITA-OT. A couple years ago, I spent a week, purely for my own edification, following this tutorial: DITA for solo writers.

It was a heroic effort on the author's part, I must say! And after a bunch of effort, I did in fact manage to hack the DITA-OT with a small topic specialization and content reuse.

And what was my output? Minimally formatted PDFs (I felt lucky I got an output at all; fixing broken PDFs was a big issue), and  seriously old-school HTML output:

Friday, March 13, 2015

Never been so proud of my coding skills...

I got a permanently dedicated section of our department's newsletter. someone took the time to make me a logo! I feel so loved.






The actual script they chose to feature in their newsletter this month is ever-so-humble, and was really quick and easy for me to author...but apparently it had an impact, because I'm already seeing reviewers adopt it. Nice when it works out that way!