ffeathers — a technical writer’s blog

Next week I’ll be hosting a webinar (an online web conference) on using a Confluence wiki for technical documentation. The guest speaker is Jon Hertzig, a technical writer at OpenCloud. Jon and the OpenCloud team have done an awesome job of creating wiki documents and tailoring their Confluence site to meet their requirements. Join the webinar if you’d like to ask him all about it

OpenCloud’s documentation portal is hosted on Confluence. You can see what they’ve done by going to the OpenCloud Development Portal or directly to the OpenCloud Rhino product documentation.

Using a wiki for technical documentation is interesting. It requires a technical writer with a certain stalwart enthusiasm Jon and I had a short meeting last week in Sydney. I’m impressed by his obvious enjoyment of the work and by the great job he’s done,

• investigating the capabilities of various tools
• deciding on a wiki
• choosing Confluence
• converting a large documentation set to Confluence format
• and then making use of Confluence macros and plugins to build an appealing, functional and useful documentation wiki.

Join us in the webinar?

Jon will give a half-hour presentation and then we’ll be able to quiz him about how he did it, what the differences are in using a wiki instead of other media for technical documentation, and what the advantages and pitfalls may be.

Date/time of the webinar session — there’s just one:

• If you’re in the USA sort of time zone: Wednesday 14th January at 3pm PST.
• If you’re in Australia or surrounds: Thursday 15th January at 10am AEST.

Follow this link if you’d like to register for the webinar:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/164766165

It will be fun to “see” you there!