A quick and enthusiastic report on last night’s PDX DITA holiday potluck with special guests from the WritetheDocs PDX Meetup Group. But first, a picture of happy documentarians.

We packed 30 people into our largest conference room for a delicious potluck (thanks Puppet team for the buffalo wings!) and a short presentation introducing DITA to prospective users. Leona Campbell and Melanie Jennings enthusiastically described the benefits and challenges of DITA as well as sharing experiences about what it’s like to get up and running with DITA when you’ve previously worked with different toolsets. Because we had a range of experiences at the table, from DITA consultants to working DITA writers to total newbies, there was a great ensuing discussion about why you’d want to use DITA rather than another tool. We also covered the need for different kinds of tooling depending on scale, the challenges of converting existing content versus writing topic-based content in DITA from scratch, and the always popular question of just how challenging it is to teach yourself DITA.

Another great outcome was the robust audience recommendations of resources, both print and online. We’ll be adding to the Resources section of this site soon, so stay tuned.

A big thank you to Mike Jang of WritetheDocs Meetup PDX for the opportunity to join forces, and to Melanie and Leona for a wonderful presentation. We’re looking forward to hearing more from our attendees, especially those who are starting up their DITA pilots soon.

Our annual Holiday Potluck and final meeting of the year is upcoming on December 3rd. This year we’re featuring a special presentation aimed at new and prospective DITA users, which will also be a joint gathering with members of the WritetheDocs PDX Meetup Group. (We Jivers had a great time attending the WritetheDocs conference this past year, but DITA was not talked about in the presentations. That made us wonder why, and this event is one of the results.)

If you’ve been waiting to show up because you feel like you don’t know where to start learning about DITA, this would be a great time to dip your toes in the water. If you’re a grizzled veteran of DITA and/or PDX DITA, we want to see you too! We’d love to hear about your year in DITA and talk about what you’re doing next.

After last year’s potluck we feel confident in promising a delicious holiday feast. (Please bring a dish! We’re two blocks from Whole Foods and the carts, if you need inspiration.). Then Jive’s Melanie Jennings and Leona Campbell will present a brief introduction to writing in DITA XML, followed by Q&A and general conversation. As usual, we’ll provide beer, questionable witticisms, and stunning views of the Portland skyline.

Looking forward to seeing you!

At our upcoming meeting on July 23rd, Roger Hadley of Grass Valley Software will explain keyrefs in DITA 1.2. You’ll learn what they are, how to use them (with real-world examples), and a few publishing pitfalls to avoid. All DITA experience levels welcome!

As usual, we’ll also do a little meet-and-greet, and enjoy a light meal together. We hope to see you.

Details: Wednesday, July 23, 2014, 6:30 – 8:00 p.m.

Jive Software, 915 SW Stark, Portland

I’ll be giving a five-minute lightning talk about DITA tomorrow at the Write the Docs meetup at Puppet Labs. Here are some resources for anyone considering using DITA:

• What is DITA and Why Should You Care? — a very nice overview written by Chris Benz for Learning Solutions Magazine.
• dita.xml.org — an awesome resource. I especially appreciate their knowledgebase. Check it out here.
• Yahoo! dita-users group — a very active community of DITA users. Ask a question, get an answer!
• DITA Awareness Group on LinkedIn
• PDX DITA Group on LinkedIn
• I have a post about understanding filtering here and plan to write more.

Please post your own resources in the comments here so we can all benefit. Looking forward to the meetup tomorrow!

Last night’s meeting was almost entirely devoted to discussing conditional filtering, with a few digressions into conrefs, content management systems, and the local taco carts. Melanie Jennings shared her detailed planning process for tagging and filtering a set of DITA files that will currently support six different filtered outputs for different audiences and platforms, but in the future may have to support many more. We also heard about how other PDX DITA members are using conditional filtering in different ways to get the most out of their files, and discussed some of the challenges of ditamap inheritance, enforcing consistent tagging, and, especially, educating all the writers in a group who need to understand not only the tagging model but how and to whom the final output will be delivered.

We were excited to have Toni Mantych join us for the first time. Toni teaches DITA over at Portland State and is planning to teach a DITA workshop in May through the local STC chapter. Stay tuned for more news about that workshop in a future post.

If you’d like to attend the next meeting in June, please check back here for the date or contact us to be added to the email list for reminders.

For our next PDX DITA meeting, we are inviting attendees to bring in and show their filtering madness. Fun, right? If you don’t know what filtering is, this would be a perfect opportunity to pick the brains of local practitioners to see what and how we’re doing with filters.

We’d like to know:

• How many topics do you have?
• How many help sets do you deliver from those topics?
• How many filter attributes do you use for those help sets?
• What kinds of validation do you use to prevent logic failures?
• What would you like to do with filters that you can’t do today? Examples encouraged.

As usual, we’ll be meeting at the lovely downtown offices of Jive Software in Portland. We are looking forward to meeting you and talking shop about DITA!

Hi DITA enthusiasts! We have an opportunity working on developer onboarding docs here at Jive Software (the current meeting place of the PDX DITA group): you could be based out of Portland or Palo Alto, reporting to our documentation team but collaborating heavily with our platform API team. If you’re interested, you’re welcome to apply directly via JobVite.

Senior Documentation Engineer at Jive

Anyone who has been to a meeting has probably already raved about our beer, snacks, and view of Powell’s Books! We’re also very modest and charming.

The work for this position will not primarily use DITA, but the rest of the Docs team authors in DITA and you’d almost certainly get the opportunity to use those skills.

Reminding all DITA enthusiasts that PDX DITA’s annual potluck and Year in DITA roundup discussion will take place at Jive Software next Wednesday, December 11th, from 6:30 to 8:00. Make something to share, run by the carts on your way in, or just have a beer and some pretzels on Jive.

We’re hoping to discuss breaking events in DITA world, talk about what we learned at LavaCon, and brag about our conversion to Oxygen Webhelp. What’s up in your world?

The founders of PDX DITA will be presenting at LavaCon! Come meet us in meatspace!

In our presentation, “Socializing Content Creation,” we’ll talk about the ways we  collaborate on technical content using all the latest social tools in our roles as technical authors at Jive Software. But more importantly, we’ll talk about how you can use social tools to get your work done. Here are the details:

“Socializing Content Creation”

Tuesday, October 22nd, 1:45-2:45

Search and Social Track

Portland Hilton and Executive Tower
921 Southwest 6th Avenue
Portland, OR 97204

At last week’s PDX DITA meetup, we were able to Skype in LA area DITA consultant Mark Giffin as an honorary Portlander. (He’s even planning on growing some interesting facial hair for future Portlandian meetups.) There were some great informative discussions and on learning that he’s attending the CIDM Content Management Strategies/DITA North America conference this week, we were able to sign him up to report in from DITA Central. We’re looking forward to hearing about what you’re learning, Mark!