Clear and Concise

 I  completed a writing assignment for a  small startup where I revamped the approach to  product documentation to emphasize short article-length documents that are preferred for posting to the Web (as if anyone really read book-oriented PDF documents cover to cover anyway). The company did not make any revisions to the existing product documentation in over a year (and plans for a new product release real soon now). View publication

This article describes  modern web applications including single-page apps, microapps. web services. and responsive web design. View publication

The impact on documentation when project teams adopt agile practices to plan and deliver products and services. View publication

Contributor to the open source collaboration between Sun Microsystems and Liferay on the Liferay Community Edition  portal software ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/lportal/ ) that combines efforts and technologies from both companies to enhance and maintain web aggregation and presentation technologies. View Publication

I wrote my first blog about my issues with blogs and wikis (specifically blogging to arouse user interest in an early draft of an article). So...after a full month of revisions incorporating feedback from the project team after first posting my article to the wiki, I think the content is now "complete" (or at least it incorporates everything that everyone on the team can think of). Then comes the deafening silence of no responses from the Liferay community...kind of like that saying "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" At first, I’m more than a little discouraged, because wikis (such as the  Liferay Community Edition)   are supposed to be this wave of the future that will bring about the age of collaborative documentation and forever break down the walls between professional technical communicators and the user community But perhaps I’m just being skeptical--it took 20 years before desktop publishing moved from the

I haven’t gotten any feedback on the articles that I posted have posted. But, just for argument\"s sake, I do get comments from users just after I start a review draft of the product documentation (which are based on the wiki articles). Do I incorporate the user comments as part of the product documentation as I would review feedback from the project team? Or should I just collect the user comments and have the product team review them for completeness and accuracy (as is done with bug reports)? In other words, should blog posts on  an open source project be considered as complete and accurate when the product documentation is available separately? Or, more to the point, can a blogreplace the need for separate product documentation? My past experience working on open source documentation projects is that, while blogs are a valuable opportunity to solicit feedback, they cannot replace the need for dedicated writers to create the required task, reference, and conceptual documentatio