Serial publishing is one of the oldest and newest forms of content strategy, particularly for fiction. Dickens did it. Dumas did it. Salman Rushdie and Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk are signing up with Substack to serialize their next projects. I’m doing the same. I am serializing my 8th-century historical novel, The Wistful and the Good, … Read More »
Transclusion is pulling content dynamically from one page into another page. Rather than cutting and pasting text from one page to another, you create a pointer to the page you are borrowing from. That pointer is resolved at run time, pulling content from the other page when your page is loaded. Transclusion was a fundamental part of Ted… Read More »
Sometimes microblogging questions require macroblogging answers. Here’s the conversation: @arh: Did @hixie really call XML a “disaster”? Is #techcomm aware of this? http://html5doctor.com/interview-with-ian-hickson-html-editor/ @mbakeranalecta: @arh XML is a disaster. Bad implementation of an essential concept. So is QWERTY. So it goes. @arh: @mbakeranalecta Generally agreed. What concerns me are the #techcomm folks who think XHTML… Read More »
“We are all publishers now” — It is one of the defining tropes of content strategy, spoken, in one form or another, by many of the pioneers of the field. So if when say, “We Are None of Us Publishers Anymore,” am I just being even more contrarian than usual? Not really. Phrases like these… Read More »
I recently wrote the following in a comment on Tom Johnson’s blog post What Tools Do Technical Writers Use: That writers are still expected to do their own publishing strikes me as one of the tragedies of the profession, and a major part of why tech pubs does not get the respect it thinks it… Read More »
What constitutes a “real” XML editor? The question is perennial, but is made topical by Tom Aldous’ surprisingly shrill defense of FrameMaker as an XML editor. It is unusual for a market-leading company to indulge in myth-busting aimed at tiny competitors. It is an approach more common to the small and desperate. But if we… Read More »