Category Archives: AODC
AODC 2010 wrapup
A couple of weeks ago I was in Darwin – ya know, that place where evolution started. ;) It’s a bit warm up there. The insects are the size of Sydney’s birds. The spiders are the size of Sydney’s fruit bats. Crocodiles lunge out of the drains and grab your ankles. Technical writers lurk under banyans swapping tales of DITA, dragons and eggcorns.
I was attending and presenting at AODC 2010, the 13th Australasian Online Documentation and Content conference. This is the third AODC conference I’ve attended, and all have been awesome. Tony Self, the organiser, has the knack of selecting interesting topics. More than a knack, I suspect it comes down to lots of hard work. The speakers and attendees alike are knowledgeable and enthusiastic technical writers, making for a great all-round experience.
The sessions
This year’s conference spanned three days and eighteen sessions. I attended every single session, even the one that started at 8am on Thursday! I’ve written summaries of most of them, as linked below:
- AODC day 1: Turning Search into Find
- AODC day 1: The Power of Controlled Language
- AODC day 1: An Update on DITA Features, Tools and Best Practices
- AODC day 1: UA Design and Implementation for iPhone App
- AODC Day 2: Managing a Documentation Project
- AODC day 2: A Beginner’s Introduction to DITA
- AODC day 2: Engaging your readers in the documentation
- AODC day 2: What Kind of Assistance do Users Really Need?
- AODC day 2: Optimising your Content for Google Search
- AODC Day 3: Converting to Structured Content
- AODC Day 3: Introduction to DITA Conditional Publishing
- AODC Day 3: Help Authoring Tool Comparison
- AODC day 3: I can’t spell Ambliance
These were the sessions I didn’t write notes for, or where my notes are too disorganised to compile a blog post from:
- Networking. This happened on the first day, and was a lot of fun. We divided into groups, based on random criteria devised by Tony, had a quick chat with our group then hustled to form the next groupings based on even more random criteria.
- The Wonders of SVG, by Tony Self.
- WinANT Echidna – The DITA Open Toolkit Made Easy, by Tony Self.
- A Walk through Google Apps, an interactive session led by a panel of experts.
- Creating Auto-Magic TOCs with XSLT, by Dave Gash.
Fun and networking
The conference is infused with fun and liberally sprinkled with grains of Tony’s inimitable humour. At one stage early in the proceedings, when Tony was introducing a session, a ribald and fairly loud comment came from the back of the room. Tony’s response was instant:
“For the new people: That’s Choco. Please ignore him.”
Of course, in real life Choco is a professional and dedicated technical writer and author. He’s also entrusted with the important task of presenting the final AODC session.
Here we’re looking uncharacteristically studious, waiting for one of the sessions to begin:
AODC 2010 wrapup
At one stage Tony announced, “There’s gold class seating at the back. We bring you your tea and coffee if you sit there.” True enough! Here’s Dave in said gold class seating. I don’t think the tea or coffee ever materialised though:
AODC 2010 wrapup
On Thursday night we all trooped down to the famous Mindil Market. The market is one of Darwin’s not-to-be-missed attractions, happening every Thursday and Sunday evening during the dry season. The thing to do is to grab a meal and a smoothie from the market stalls, then mosey on down to Mindil Beach to watch the sunset. You may recognise a few AODCers in these silhouettes:
AODC 2010 wrapup
If you’d like to see more pictures and words about Mindil Market and Darwin, take a look at what the Travelling Worm has to say. He was there at AODC too, strictly under cover of course. He did valiantly stand between me and a crocodile or two.
Uncle Dave’s Trivia Night
No AODC conference is complete without it. I’ve devoted a whole blog post to Uncle Dave’s Trivia Night.
More photos on Flickr
I’ve uploaded a set of AODC photos on Flickr. If anyone has any more photos, please add a comment to this post, linking to your photos. I’d love to see them!
See you at AODC 2011
I’m looking forward to next year’s conference already!
AODC 2010 day 2: Engaging your readers in the documentation
Last month I attended AODC 2010, the Australasian Online Documentation and Content conference. Over the last few weeks I’ve been posting my summaries of the conference sessions. Now it’s the turn of my own presentation.
My presentation was called “Engaging your readers in the documentation”. Conversation, the social web, community – they’re all the buzz. OK, sounds good, but how do you get your readers involved in the documentation?
Downloading the presentation
Attached to this blog post are two PDF files containing my presentation:
- Engaging your readers in the documentation: slides only – presentation slides only (2,327 KB).
- Engaging your readers in the documentation – slides and notes – slides with speaker’s notes (2,441 KB).
Overview of the presentation
At Atlassian, we’ve been experimenting with social media and other techniques. My presentation takes an in-depth look at the tools and techniques we’re using.
We write and publish our documentation on Confluence wiki. The wiki, and in particular a Confluence macro called the Widget Connector, provide many opportunities for integrating other social media into the documentation pages. Examples of such social tools are Twitter, Flickr and Wufoo.
Even if you’re not using a wiki, you’ll still be able to apply these ideas and techniques in and around your technical documentation.
AODC 2010 day 2: Engaging your readers in the documentation
The presentation covers the following techniques and tools for engaging your readers:
- Getting feedback from readers via comments on the documentation pages.
- Using Wufoo forms as another feedback mechanism. You can embed a Wufoo form into your wiki page or other web pages.
- Holding a doc sprint, where a group of people got together to write tutorials. Our focus was plugin and gadget development, so we invited the developers too. We use a Flickr photo stream in the doc sprint wiki to show the sprinters in action.
- A few ways of using Twitter‘s hash tags, viral tendencies and 140-character limitation to their best advantage. We tweet our release notes. In one of our long procedural documents, readers can tweet when they hit each milestone and can follow the tweets to see how others are faring. Breaking news: We’re about to start encouraging people to tweet their hints and tips. We’ll embed the Twitter stream into a documentation page, so that tweeters can see their tips appearing in our documentation, and readers can see other people’s hints in real time.
- Linking to external blog posts from within your documentation. Our “Tips of the Trade” pages link to external blog posts where our readers share their own hard-won tips and techniques.
- Letting other people edit your documentation. Is it safe? We use wiki permissions to control who can do what. Technical writers monitor all updates via RSS feeds and wiki watches. Our developer documentation is open for editing by any logged-in user. That means that anyone can click the “Sign Up” button, get a wiki user ID and start editing the developer docs immediately. We have a contributor’s licence agreement that we ask people to sign before they get permission to update the product documentation. A Creative Commons (cc-by) licence lets readers and contributors know what copyright rules apply.
- The idea of documentation as an emotional experience and of having a game in and around the edges of your documents. The presentation looks at a case study, Atlassian’s Here Be Dragons documentation.
- Lots and lots of links and references in the last few slides. In particular, I’ve linked to some blog posts by other technical writers who are talking about and experimenting with similar techniques. Anne Gentle’s book is a great source of ideas: Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation. Peg Mulligan wrote about “social business, also known as enterprise 2.0″. Julie Stickler blogged on HeraTech about Agile Doc Reviews – The Documentation Sprint. Lisa Dyer writes “I suppose we’ll soon agree on a name for the era we’ve entered” in her blog post about “Business intelligence, intelligent content and devices, games, and noise”. Bill Kerschbaum asks “Did you hear the one about the user guide with a sense of humor?” Ellis Pratt’s writes on the Cherryleaf blog about “Turning technical documentation into an emotional experience (for the customer)”.
I hope you enjoy the presentation. Let me know if it gives you some useful hints and ideas. :)
AODC Day 3: I can’t spell Ambliance!
Last month I attended AODC 2010, the Australasian Online Documentation and Content conference. We were in Darwin, in Australia’s “Top End”. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been posting my summaries of the conference sessions, derived from my notes taken during the presentations. All the credit goes to the presenter. Any mistakes or omissions are my own.
Frank “Choco” Munday presented the last session of the conference. Choco is an awesome presenter. It’s something of a tradition (the AODC has a few of those) that the conference ends with a raucous laugh. Choco excels at putting that sort of finishing touch to an event!
AODC Day 3: I can't spell Ambliance!
In this presentation, we looked at some horrors that technical writers may encounter and indeed should do our utmost to avoid.
Eggcorns
“Eggcorn” is a linguistic term for the practice of replacing a complex or scientific term with a more commonly-used word, especially when people swap the unfamiliar part of a phrase with a word that occurs more often in their own dialect. An oft-quoted example is the use of “old-timers disease” instead of “Alzheimer’s disease”. Wikipedia says that the term “eggcorn” was coined by Geoffrey Pullum in 2003, based on a case where a woman used the phrase “egg corns” when she meant “acorns”.
Choco was specifically concerned with “eggcorns” as spell-as-you-speak errors. He took us through a rollicking and somewhat scathing look at a number of eggcorns, such as:
- “Should of” for “should have” – a frequent occurrence in Australia.
- “At your beckoned call”.
- “For all intensive purposes”.
- “I think I might be lack toast and tolerant” for “lactose intolerant”.
Choco showed a number of examples from print and online media, and lambasted them thoroughly. It’s well worth getting him to run through his list with you.
Mixed metaphors
Next Choco turned his eagle eye to mixed metaphors. Politicians were worth their weight in gold here.
Choco said, “I would slip one or two into my technical documentation, just to see what happens”. (Mixed metaphors, that is, not politicians.) :)
Unwords
Unwords got some Choco love too. Choco suggests we take a look at the Unword Dictionary at unwords.com.
So I did that. Here’s an unword I like:
19. bandpulliphobia (bănd-pu’lə-fō’bē-ə)
- a. (n.) The fear of pulling off a band-aid; Especially when counting down from three.
Remembering that we were attending a serious technical writing conference, Choco did mention with a straight face (for a split second, anyway) that unwords are words that are not really words, so there’s a chance that people won’t understand them. We should therefore avoid them in our technical documentation. I was glad of this reminder, as I was starting to feel the temptation. ;)
My conclusion
A fittingly boisterous end to AODC. Fun, but with a serious undertone. Thank you Choco.
AODC Day 3: Introduction to DITA Conditional Publishing
A couple of weeks ago I attended AODC 2010, the Australasian Online Documentation and Content conference. We were in Darwin, in Australia’s “Top End”. This post is my summary of one of the sessions at the conference and is derived from my notes taken during the presentation. All the credit goes to Dave Gash, the presenter. Any mistakes or omissions are my own.
This year’s AODC included a number of useful sessions on DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. I’ve already written about Tony Self’s session, an update on DITA features and tools, and about Suchi Govindarajan’s session, an introduction to DITA.
Now Dave Gash presented one of the more advanced DITA sessions, titled “Introduction to DITA Conditional Publishing”.
At the beginning of his talk, Dave made an announcement. He has presented in countries all over the world, many times, and he has never ever ever before done a presentation in shorts!
AODC Day 3: Introduction to DITA Conditional Publishing
Introducing the session
To kick off, Dave answered the question, “Why do we care about conditional processing?” One of the tenets of DITA is re-use. You may have hundreds or even thousands of topics. In any single documentation set, you probably don’t want to publish every piece of the documentation every time.
Conditional processing is a way to determine which content is published at any one time.
Dave’s talk covered these subjects:
- A review of DITA topics, maps and publishing flow
- The use of metadata
- The mechanics of conditional processing
- Some examples
Metadata and the build process
Dave ran us through a quick review of the DITA build process and the concept of metadata. Metadata has many uses. Dave talked specifically about metadata for the control of content publication.
Metadata via attributes
There are a number of attributes available on most DITA elements. These are some of the attributes Dave discussed:
- audience – a group of intended readers
- product – the product name
- platform – the target platform
- rev – product version number
- otherprops – you can use this for other properties
Example:
<step audience="advanced">
Using metadata for conditional processing
Basically, you use the metadata to filter the content. For example, let’s assume you are writing the installation guide for a software application. You may store all the instructions for Linux, Windows and Mac OS in one file. When publishing, you can filter the operating systems and produce separate output for each OS.
In general, you can put metadata in these 3 locations (layers):
- maps – metadata on the <map> element. You might use metadata at this layer to build a manual from similar topics for specific versions of a product.
- topics – metadata to select an entire topic. You might use metadata at this layer to build a documentation set for review by a specific person.
- elements – metadata on individual XML elements inside a topic. You might use this metadata to select steps that are relevant for beginners, as opposed to intermediate or advanced users.
Dave gave us some guidelines on how to decide which of the above layers to use under given circumstances.
Defining the build conditions to control the filtering
Use the ditaval file to define the filter conditions. This file contains the conditions that we want to match on, and actions to take when they’re matched. The build file contains a reference to the ditaval file, making sure it drives the build.
Dave talked us through the <prop> element in the ditaval file, and its attributes:
- att – attribute to be processed
- val – value to be matched
- action – action to take when match is found
A hint: You can use the same attribute in different layers (map, topic and element). Also, you don’t need to specify the location. The build will find the attributes, based on the <prop> element in the ditaval file.
Next we looked at the “include” and “exclude” actions. Remember, the action is one of the attributes in the <prop> element, as described above. Here’s an example of an action:
<prop att="audience" val="novice" action="exclude" />
Dave’s recommendation, very strongly put :) is:
Don’t use “include”. Stick to “exclude”.
The basic rule is: Everything not explicitly excluded is included.
Dave’s final recommendation
Go get DITA and play with it!
My conclusion
It was great to have a focus on the conditional publishing side of DITA. It’s something I haven’t had a chance to get into before. Now I know the basics, which rounds off the DITA picture for me. Thank you Dave for an entertaining and information-packed talk.
