Dita4Hudson project on SourceForge
A recent comment by Yucheng on my preview of Dita4Hudson post finally motivated me to upload my starter code to SourceForge so that others can contribute and make use of it.
The plugin right now is mostly front-end code and does not yet run the DITA Open Toolkit transforms. The intent of the plugin is to very simply provide text fields that a user can enter any and all applicable transform parameters for a given output type and then in the background those would be passed to the toolkit in the appropriate form and basically be a command line call.
I would love to see others pick up where I left off. I hope to be able to continue working on it again in the future, but for now I have too much else going on. I would be happy to help someone out with getting going with it. Please comment or use the contact form to get in touch.
Preview of Dita4Hudson plugin for the Hudson continuous integration server
I am progressing a bit further on my plugin that will allow for easier DITA builds within the Hudson continuous integration server. Hudson is a quite handy build management system that offers you a lot of additional value on top of your existing builds and processes.
You can use your existing DITA-OT Ant scripts to build your output within Hudson. Many Dita users are not Ant experts and often Ant is one of the limiting factors in Dita adoption by smaller teams. I hope this plugin will help further promote DITA and provide another simple tool for Dita builds.
All feedback and suggestions are welcome. Read the rest of this entry »
Quick tips for troubleshooting plugins in an Eclipse help system
Posted by brett in eclipse-help-system on January 31, 2010
The Eclipse help system is an extremely valuable tool that seems to intimidate new users. This post is intended to cover some of the very basics about how to troubleshoot your plugins in an Eclipse help system. Read the rest of this entry »
Patent #7,627,854 – Graphical Aid for Generating Object Setup Scripts
I discovered today that nearly four years after filing our initial patent paperwork that our US patent was finally issued. A few months back, we received a Chinese patent for the same submission (#ZL200710001513.4).
You can read more about the work that went into this submission and also read the patent itself.
Recently, the tool that inspired this patent was bundled as embedded feature of the IBM InfoSphere Replication Server Version 9.7 that shipped to customers this last June.
Photo of the actual Chinese patent:
Link checking your topics in an Eclipse Help System/Infocenter
Posted by brett in eclipse-help-system on November 25, 2009
Links can be painful to deal with in help systems especially in multi-author environments or with larger numbers of topics. Maintaining links over time can also be difficult. If you are authoring your help in DITA and using relationship tables, you might find they aren’t as easy to maintain as many claim. The Eclipse help system can make link validation difficult due to its frameset and difficulty for most link checkers to find all of your pages. Read the rest of this entry »
DITA builds with WinAnt Echidna
I recently stumbled across the WinAnt Echidna project on SourceForge while browsing the DITA Open Toolkit project forums. While DITA as a markup language is not difficult to learn and begin to start creating content, DITA can be difficult to see the fruits of those labors if you are just getting starting with the DITA-OT. Most information developers are not experts in XSL or ANT. The WinAnt tool can help them get started with producing DITA sourced content very quickly.
WinAnt is generally going to appeal to writers and teams on smaller projects. Larger and more complex projects and deliverables likely have requirements that go beyond what WinAnt provides. Read the rest of this entry »
DITA as a wiki format?
Wikis for documentation make sense for many reasons, including low cost of implementation, ease of publishing, and collaboration possibilities. DITA has become a popular XML format for semantic markup of information and is generally used for documentation. Wiki content is generally authored or stored as wikitext, which is an non-standardized markup format. Should DITA be used as a markup format for wikis instead of wikitext or HTML? I believe the answer is that DITA in the authoring environment of wikis is impractical and does not work for general audiences. Read the rest of this entry »
New technologies must always be applied to recipes first
It always baffles me why the first place that people often try to apply new technologies is to the Kitchen, specifically recipes. This practice reminds of starting with Hello World for programming and Lorem Ipsum Dolar for design. Basically that says “we have some cool tools but we really don’t yet know what to do with them.” The next logical step is somehow making this tool apply to recipes right? Then you have a tool and a purpose. Read the rest of this entry »
Information developer or software engineer? Or something in between?
I have a really hard time describing my role to people outside of IBM. If I wanted to be lazy and did not want to go into details and explain all my different projects, I would likely quickly state that I am a technical writer.
I do not consider myself to be a technical writer though because I believe the term is so limiting. I worked as a web developer for five years while I was completing my Bachelor of Science degree in Technical Communication, which is from the department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington.
Most of my work experience has been in the realm of web development and my degree work was an even mix of user experience engineering and technical writing. Read the rest of this entry »