Wow...lots of sessions and networking and talking and eating and drinking today!

I started the day in Cheri Lockett Zubak's session on reusability in Author-it. She's created numerous topic templates for one of her clients that include boilerplate text to help the content developers when they're creating topics. The nice thing about all those topic templates is that they are basically a way of identifying "information types" while in development, based on the template that's being used. And she wrote this really long document that describes each topic type, what information is required and optional, the styles that will be used, and more. (She should market that document. I'd buy it.)

Next up was Luke Wroblewski's session on visual hierarchy. I love listening to Luke...he does such a great job of presenting this information. (I started redesigning helpstuff while listening to him. I have no idea when I'll have time to actually do the work.) Watch his blog...he should be posting his slides soon. And his new book, Web Form Design (Filling in the Blanks), is due from the publisher "any day now". Go to Rosenfeld Media and save 15% by entering FOLUKE15 when ordering.

After lunch, Geoff Hart and I presented our session on editing online Help. Geoff developed a process for using Word with Track Changes enabled to edit HTML files for those folks using one of the HTML file-based HATs (such as Flare, RoboHelp, Doc-To-Help, etc.) which lets the Help author pass the file to the editor for review, and then the editor passes the file back to the Help author who resolves all edits and comments. The file can then be loaded back into the project folder and compiled. The system is slightly different for Author-it and other tools with a built-in processor, and slightly different again for tools that use Word (or Frame) as the word processor, as the editor can just use the appropriate application for editing.

I spent the rest of the afternoon talking to people...answering questions or just chatting. I talked about future conference sessions with a couple of folks, and answered some Author-it questions, too.

The day ended with MadCap's mixer in the Pavillion...good food (although a bit too spicy for me), big bar, and lots of prizes.

For various reasons, I'm headed home first thing tomorrow morning. I'm bummed because I'm missing some awesome sessions...Rhonda's on reviewing the user interface, Mike Hughes' on task support clusters, Dave Gash's on XSLT transforms, Mark Wallis' on DITA pilot projects, and the closing pundits panel. But after being on the road for almost two weeks, I'm ready to go home!

Watch the other blogs for information on day 3 at WritersUA :-)