Writing and Indexing Samples

Table of Contents

Writing Samples

Indexing Samples

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Viewing the Samples

Many of these samples are in PDF format. Please allow time for the PDF files to download completely before trying to page through them. Otherwise, you might get messages saying there was an error with the PDF. To view the PDFs, you will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. The PDF writing samples should open in Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

A few are in WebWorks or Flare WebHelp format. Because of changes made to Chrome in recent years, those samples might not open in Chrome. If that is the case for you, try Internet Explorer or Firefox.

This page contains links to some samples of my writing and indexing projects. Because of client confidentiality, I cannot provide samples for my more recent work.

Writing Samples

Here are links to a few samples of the many materials I have written.

• Max Assistive Technology, a suite of tools to make Second Life universally accessible. This is the first draft. I used Madcap's Flare as a native authoring and help generation tool. This project went into hiatus right after I created this draft. Note that although the font size is relative, so that pages can be scaled up or down (for accessibility), it is very large by default to accommodate visually impaired readers, who were the primary audience.
• March 2009: Zuora API Developer's Guide. I wrote this developer's guide from scratch using MadCap’s Flare and output it in Flare's cross-platform WebHelp format. As part of this task, I created a Flare template that coordinated with Zuora’s Web site and company colors.
  
  I also worked on Zuora's customer-facing documentation, which is in wiki format, putting existing content into proper wiki code format, adding hyperlinks to other topics in the wiki, and editing all the content. I also wrote some of the content. (See the links under Z-Billing, Z-Payments, Z-Finance, and Z-Commerce.)
• 2002-2008: Below are links to a few manuals from KnowNow, for whom I consulted from 2002 to 2008. When I started working for KnowNow, they had two products with three manuals of approximately 200 pages total. As KnowNow added products and capabilities, I completely rewrote their earlier documentation and wrote all new manuals from scratch. By the time they closed their doors, the documentation set was eleven manuals and over 1,800 pages. For information sources, I used the software, read engineering documents, and interviewed developers as needed. I created the document design in Adobe FrameMaker using the company's official fonts and colors. The following books were in the middle of revision and development for a new release at the time I created these PDFs; KnowNow closed their doors at this time.
• The LiveServer Developer's Guide. Written for developers. Documents the various KnowNow Connectors (bridge applications written in Java, JavaScript, C++, and .NET), as well as events and the KnowNow filter modules. Provides overviews of the various APIs.
• The LiveServer Administration Guide. Mainly for system administrators. Documents the LiveServer, which was a publish-and-subscribe server and a Web server. Includes various system configuration and administration tasks.
• The ESS Administration Guide. Mainly for system administrators, with some developer information. Documents the Enterprise Syndication Solution (ESS) product, which had a number of satellite components. With ESS, people within a corporation could exchange business-oriented data using RSS feeds. Businesses could also set up an internal network in which individuals could subscribe to various channels (such as company news, as well as news feeds from various sources) and receive real-time notification of new items in those channels.
• The ESS Admin Guide in WebWorks WebHelp format.
• The LiveBrowser API documentation in Natural Docs format. This Natural Docs-generated API manual for developers was created at my suggestion. Editing the source files directly, I wrote and formatted the descriptive material for each component. (I.e., I wrote the material from the top of each page down to and including the Summary sections. In some cases, I also wrote enhanced descriptions for the individual calls.) This API provided components that developers could embed in Web pages, so I experimented with several of those components to be better able to document them.
• LiveServer release notes in HTML format.

Indexing Samples

I also indexed several of the books listed above under Writing Samples.

• 2001: The CoSine IPNOS Command Line Interface Configuration Guide index. Not perfect because time was tight and I was not able to have all the files in hand at once. I sent corrections to the editor after the project was completed for her to implement in the final manual, which she did. This file does not reflect those corrections.