Technical Writing, Editing, Web Development, and Graphics.

Resume

I'm currently looking for a position where I can exercise my Web development skills. Here's my resume in PDF.

Single-Source Publishing

The doc team at Avesta Technologies used some very advanced tools to optimize our workflow. We wrote our docs in FrameMaker+SGML, and published them to three different output formats: PDF for print, compiled books for dynamic HTML (served by DynaWeb), and static HTML files for local installation. This was back before XML was a standard, and before tools like WebWorks Publisher made the single-source approach commonplace.

I was responsible for maintaining the templates and tools that our workflow required:

• Our FrameMaker EDD, which contained complex rules for automatic formatting based on element structure
• Conversion rules for exporting from FrameMaker to SGML
• Stylesheets for formatting our documents on the Web
• Our modified DynaWeb Server, a specialized Web server designed to serve our books as dynamic Web pages
• A program I wrote to retrieve books from the DynaWeb server and save them as static HTML files

DocBook Customizations

FrameMaker+SGML comes with a DocBook DTD package. I modified the rules for automatic formatting to match our document template styles. As our document set developed, I also made some changes to the actual element structure. I streamlined the DTD to eliminate elements we weren't using. I simplified the content model of <Para> and similar elements, tightening up validation and making our markup standards more apparent to new authors on the team.

Another modification I started was to incorporate some of the Information Mapping technique into our section-level element structure. The idea was to replace the generic <Sect1>, <Sect2>, and so on with more descriptive section types — and to use FrameMaker's structure validation to guide authors as they create the sections. Unfortunately, before we could put this into practice, Avesta was acquired and our product line got shelved. But I'll soon be outlining my proposed element structure here, along with sample documents.

WebWorks Help Customizations

At Visual Networks we used WebWorks Publisher to deliver online help. I made some changes to their "WebWorks Help" template, from rebranding to adding new functionality.

Here are old instructions I wrote on how to replicate some of my more generally useful modifications:

• Automatic TOC Line Highlighting in the JavaScript Implementation of WebWorks Help 3.0
• Automatic TOC Syncing in WebWorks Help 3.0

(I include these here as part of my work portfolio, not as a modification to be applied to later versions of WebWorks Help. In fact I believe the WebWorks Help format now does these things by default, with no modification necessary.)