Category: Web technologies & information standards (Page 27 of 58)

We had a great discussion last week in our session, Using DITA for Enterprise Publishing. One of the themes was about using DITA for business documents; two of the speakers, Michael Boses of Quark/In.Vision and Eric Severson of Flatirons Solutions, are on the DITA Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee. We didn’t get to talking much about blogs, but then this announcement caught my eye today: DITA for WordPress.

A few days ago I released the DITA-OT and the WordPress plugins that enable me to publish part of the (almost inexistant) DITA-OP documentation on this blog. I am talking about the About, Download and Getting Started pages that appear in the menu up here. The DITA-OT plugin transforms a map into a single file, suitable for publication, and automatically call the xmlrpc API of the blog to publish it. The DITA WordPress plugin adds a css (a slightly modified version of the DITA-OT commonltr.css) to your WordPress theme to properly render the standard domains. You can download both plugins here, they are released under the GPL license.

I am happy to announce that long time colleague Dale Waldt has joined us officially as a Senior Consultant. Dale has worked with us on a few projects over the years, and I have known him since the early days of SGML when he was at the IRS (who were early supporters of SGML). Dale also spent many years as VP Product Technology at RIA, the tax publishing business unit of the Thomson Corporation designing SGML and XML applications, and has spent the last few years helping organizations understand the business benefits of, and implement, XML strategies. We’ll post Dale’s bio shortly, but Dale will be at Gilbane Boston next week, along with most of us, where someone at out booth can help you track him down to meet him.
Dale is obviously steeped in XML expertise, and he is also a great communicator. Dale will be joining our XML practice, but will also be helping out in other areas where he has expertise including content management, digital asset management, and social media.
Dale’s email address is: dale@gilbane.com and his phone extension is 155.
Welcome Dale!

But I am trying, maybe, sort of, to wean myself from Microsoft Office. It isn’t so much that I dislike Office–it is fine–but I find myself going through notebook computers faster than my friends used to go through muscle cars back in the 70s–which is, well, fast. When I go to rebuild that machine, or move myself onto a new one, I find that even a few days of lost data is a big deal. I suppose I could go with an online backup service like Carbonite, but my real goal is to live more in the cloud and also to live sort of free.

So I’ve downloaded and begun working with Open Office, though not exclusively, and have also started to work with Thunderbird. I also spent some time setting up a sync between the Thunderbird Lightning calendar helper and Google Calendar. There are some glitches to Thunderbird, though. It does not recognize Vcards, of all things (though I found a workaround). And it also doesn’t let me click on and accept meeting invitations (nor does Google Calendar). I have to do this awkward step of saving the calendar file to disk, then import it into Google Calendar, then wait for Google Calendar and Thunderbird/Lightning to sync.

These seem like really simple, really easy things for Thunderbird folks to fix. The file formats for the calendar file and Vcard could not be simpler. I would venture that they will get to these.

But now I have a new problem. Frank, generous guy that he is, offered me the use of a Treo he no longer uses. I used to use Palm devices religiously, but I was even harder on them than I am on notebooks, so my wife stopped letting me buy them at some point. (Not only would I break them but I would leave them behind–in cabs, on planes, in trains, in rental cars–you get the picture.) I am going to give this a go again, but it looks like I will have an issue syncing with Thunderbird. The open source tool for syncing has some problems (“Some Thunderbird fields do not sync, eg. second e-mail address, mailing address, mobile phone.” Huh? Mobile phone?), and as near as I can tell, there are no other tools for syncing.

So I guess I go back to Outlook at least, or do people know of some options out there that I have missed?

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