In the Agile Technical Writers forum on LinkedIn, one of its members posted this question: “I need to create an contextual online help for an complex web tool (ok, that´s not that hard). The customer must be able to add some specific job instructions to this online help by himself. The customer part must not be overridden when the… Read more »
Category: user generated content
Stack Overflow is moving into documentation (get the popcorn)
Stack Overflow, a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers, has announced its plans to add documentation to the site: “Lately we’ve been asking ourselves “what else could we do to improve developers’ lives on the internet?”. Jeff’s original announcement of Stack Overflow said this: There’s far too much great programming information trapped in forums,… Read more »
Content as an API – Google’s engineering documentation
Google’s Riona MacNamara presented at the Write The Docs North America conference on “Documentation, Disrupted: How Two Technical Writers Changed Google Engineering Culture“. In the video of the presentation below, Riona explains how she worked with a small team of writers and engineers to build a documentation platform in six months that is becoming a part of the… Read more »
Atlassian no longer lets users comment on its documentation – good or bad news?
Last week, Atlassian sent out this message on Twitter: We’re changing our documentation platform, including closing comments. Read more and learn why http://t.co/PjZVCV1Vze — Atlassian (@Atlassian) April 14, 2015 This was a surprise, as Atlassian has been a strong advocate for having user comments appended to user documentation. Sarah Maddox, when she was working at… Read more »
The big questions in technical communication
David Farbey wrote a semi-existentialist post on the challenges for technical communicators yesterday. I’d like to look at the issue in a different way, by looking at the big questions in technical communication today. The answers to these questions (which may be decided by people outside of the profession) are likely to affect the future… Read more »