ffeathers

A technical writer’s blog.

Maddox, Sarah. ffeathers. Resources>Writing>Technical Writing>Blogs

Reviewing Wiki Documentation via Crucible

I have been playing around with Crucible, Atlassian’s peer code review tool. The latest version of Crucible allows you to review Confluence wiki pages. This is a new feature, so I decided to try it out. Also, I was wondering why you might want to use an independent tool to review a wiki page, when you could instead just add comments to the page or update the page directly.

Maddox, Sarah. ffeathers (2009). Articles>Web Design>Documentation>Wikis

Content, Standards, Learning and SCORM

Within content domains, the key themes of the information age are being adopted: Modularisation, specialisation, integration and interoperability. Our communication is changing in volume, purpose and channels. The emphasis is more on collaboration and less on expert-to-novice teaching. And there’s a stronger emphasis on openness.

Maddox, Sarah. ffeathers (2009). Articles>Education>Online>Standards

Twitter as a Medium for Release Notes

I’m going to start with a short introduction to Twitter, mentioning particularly the aspects that I found useful when tweeting release notes. If you’re already a twitterologist, you may want to skip that bit. Then I’ll describe how we’ve used Twitter as a method of communicating the highlights of our release notes.

Maddox, Sarah. ffeathers (2009). Articles>Documentation>Social Networking>Technical Writing

What Makes a Technical Writer Tick?

Technical writers are Jills and Jacks of all trades. But what really makes a tech writer tick? In this guest post, Sarah Maddox explores that question and comes up with some interesting answers.

Maddox, Sarah. DMN Communications (2009). Articles>Writing>Technical Writing

Linking to External Blog Posts from Our Documentation

A technical writer’s blog on Wordpress Linking to external blog posts from our documentation with 3 comments At work, we’ve just started a new set of documentation pages called “Tips of the Trade“. The project is still in the early stages. I thought other tech writers might be interested, so I’m blogging about it now. There will be a page for each of the products we document. The pages contain a set of links to useful blog posts written by people out there on the www. It’s a way of giving our readers more information and a way of involving external bloggers, developers and authors in our documentation.

Maddox, Sarah. ffeathers (2009). Articles>Documentation>Hypertext>Blogging

The Atlassian Contributor License Agreement Comes of Age

In early March we opened up the Atlassian documentation to the wider community. We added a CC-by (Creative Commons Attribution) license to our product documentation. We invited people to contribute to our documentation after signing an Atlassian Contributor License Agreement (ACLA). At that stage, the ACLA was just starting its three-month trial. The trial period has now ended, and we're delighted to say: it's a go!

Maddox, Sarah. Atlassian Blog, The (2009). Articles>Documentation>Wikis>Case Studies

Getting Content Into and Out of Wikis

As wikis mature, we’re using them for more complex business cases such as technical documentation, business analysis and project management. It’s becoming more and more interesting, if not essential, for wikis to support the import and export of content to and from other formats. Most wikis allow you to convert their pages at least to PDF and HTML. But what of other formats, and what about tools for getting content into wikis as well as out of them?

Maddox, Sarah. ffeathers (2009). Articles>Content Management>Wikis>Documentation

WebWorks ePublisher for Converting Documents to Confluence Wiki

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had the chance to experiment with WebWorks ePublisher, a set of tools that converts documents from Word, FrameMaker and DITA XML to a number of different output formats. One of those output formats is Confluence wiki. It’s been very interesting, so I thought I’d blog about it and see if anyone else wants to give it a go as well.

Maddox, Sarah. ffeathers (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Wikis

I Got Dragons and Tweets in My Documents

There’s a place for a lighter touch in much of the online documentation we write. It’s a delicate balance. On the one hand, it’s important that the writing style does not annoy or offend the reader and does not detract from the content. We also need to be aware of people whose first language is not the one we’re writing in. On the other hand, the occasional touch of humour or personality can focus the reader’s attention onto the page.

Maddox, Sarah. ffeathers (2009). Articles>Documentation>Wikis>Case Studies