Author Archives: mmeyer

Our June 2012 Meeting: “Hands on with EPUBs – Mini-Workshop,” with Scott Prentice

Those wise and fortunate enough to attend this meeting left appreciating a learning experience one likely would have to travel to an STC conference to obtain. Again, Scott Prentice shared his considerable depth of understanding of the technical details underlying the words we read on the surface, and in the case of EPUB, we got

Our May 2012 Meeting: “Emerging Roles and Hot Markets for Tomorrow’s Tech Writers,” with Andrew Davis

With tight job markets, unique skills requirements, and risk-averse hiring managers, finding work in the world of technical communications is not what it used to be . . . no more mirror test. However, the world of contract and contract-to-hire can still be rewarding for individuals who have precisely what a company (often a young

Our March 2012 Meeting: “Agile Documentation (Hi, Honey, I joined a cult!)”

Fundamentals of Agile Development Mike Ziegenhagen, a technical writer and tech pubs manager in the software business for more than 18 years, has also specialized in documenting virtual worlds. One virtual world you may be familiar with is the one that “relates” (read “force fits”) product specifications to actual products. If you have ever suffered

Call for Chapter Officers

Our chapter meetings may not be SRO, but we still provide a service to the North Bay technical documentation community — and we invite your participation in chapter roles. As long as you are an STC member and are able to attend regular chapter meetings (you do not need to be a NorthBay Chapter member),

Topic-Based Authoring with Linda Urban

STC Sacramento is presenting the following workshop: Saturday October 22, 2011 9 AM to 5 PM Topic-based authoring is a technique for writing content as discrete, stand-alone pieces (“topics”) that can be combined and reused in different ways. The topic-based approach has been getting a lot of attention recently because it is an integral part

Our July 2011 Meeting: “ePub: What, Why, and How?” with Scott Prentice

Scott Prentice, chapter webmeister, president of Leximation, and all-around FrameMaker guru, brought us up to date regarding the latest developments in electronic book publication standards. With the current proliferation of portable Internet devices, the savvy tech doc specialist may want to be aware of the issues involved in converting source documents to those that are

Our March 2011 Meeting: Optimizing Your Portfolio, with Andrew Davis

Andrew Davis, formerly principal of Synergistech Communications and now a recruiter for Content Rules (formerly Oak Hill Corporation), provided valuable insights (both live and remotely) at our March 2011 meeting. A true champion of the candidate, he reads a lot of job descriptions and resumes, and made clear that a great portfolio (and approach) is

Our January 25, 2011 Meeting: “Write More, Write Less” with Joe Welinske

Joe Welinske has been a technical writer since 1984, and one of his first documents was a comic book. In four colors. For plumbers. To put in a hip pocket. Why make plumbers carry around a standard size tech doc to tell them how fit pipe when something much smaller would do? The manual was

January 22, 2011: Annual Berkeley Chapter Party and Touchstone Awards

Join us to relax with fellow communicators, enjoy a buffet dinner, and celebrate excellence in the profession. Every year Touchstone, the Northern California Technical Communication Competition, receives many fine entries. We send the best ones to the STC International Summit Awards competitions. We will announce this year’s winners and display their entries throughout the evening.

Our October 2010 Meeting: Publishing PDFs from DITA

At our last meeting, Scott Prentice, chapter webmaster and president of Leximation, Inc., presented a concise summary of the motivations and issues involved in using the Darwin Information Typing Architecture to produce PDFs. Why use DITA at all? By using XML to author in a topic-oriented structure, DITA lets you rearrange topics and reuse them