The iiRDS for the c-rex.net blog

How we create, quality assure, translate, gender, and publish our blog posts. And how we've set up our editorial environment to do it.

The picture shows five highlighters with open caps, on which the letters of the word "BLOG!" are spread.

Read here how we create, quality assure, translate, gender and publish our blog posts. And how we've set up our editorial environment to do it.

5 highlights of the iiRDS for our blog

Not for nothing is one of our central mottos: Content is King.

Content is poured into a mold, which in our case is XML format during creation, from which it can easily flow back out.

The entire process from creation to publication takes place within or is controlled from a DITA-XML.

Let's take a closer look at the following areas:

Create
Quality Assurance
Gender
Translate
Publish

Create

Our blog posts are created based on DITA-XML. For this purpose we use the oXygen XML Editor.

We have specialized a separate Topic the Blogpost type. This implements an extension for teaser information and uses our standard extensions for metadata.

For more details, see the blog post Conception of the c-rex.net blog based on iiRDS and DITA.

Quality Assurance

The picture shows a yellow sign with the text Quality Control.

Quality assurance takes place to a large extent in parallel with creation. Of course, we use the standard tools for validation.

In addition, technical writers receive writing support via plug-ins and Schematron.

Sentences that are too long, incorrectly used terms, forgotten metadata are marked in the editor and can be quickly corrected.

For citations we have a colloquial register, for technical terms we have a term database, for gender-sensitive personal names we have a so-called Genderdatenbank.

In this way, we achieve a high standard of quality in the editorial department and make our texts fit for the subsequent processes of translation and publication.

Gender

The picture shows six pieces of colored chalk

Since a few months our blog articles are written in a way that all people can feel addressed. We let the readers choose in which variant they want to read our articles. You can choose between the generic masculine, the generic feminine, a variant with colon and the pair or double form.

We solved this by inserting so-called gender terms from a TBX database into our texts. These are terms that we replace in HTML at runtime with the variant that readers choose.

Those who want to learn more about it can do so in our blog posts:

Gendering smart solved: A technical solution for PDF publishing and content delivery on the web

From one who went out to write in a gender-sensitive way

Translate

For the translation of our blog we use the Machine Translation Engine DeepL.

In a nutshell, the translation process goes like this:

Using self-developed plug-ins that extend the DITA-OT-Framework, we collect, organize and compile the data to be translated in such a way that it can subsequently be processed with c-rex.net DTS.
c-rex.net DTS generates XLIFFs for each file.
The data is prepared using ITS Rules and SRX Rules for DeepL.
After the actual translation, the data is converted from XLIFF to DITA again.

The entire process is started from the editing environment by pressing a button (calling a transformation scenario).

After a few minutes the translated files are available.

You can read in detail how this tool for automatic translation integrates into our fully automated translation process in the article Translating the c-rex.net blog with MT.

Publish

The image shows a finger pressing a red button.

Publishing is done at the push of a button, which is used to call up a transformation scenario. Using our own data conversion service, c-rex.net DTS, we first convert the content to iiRDS and then publish it on c-rex.net IDS.

For this purpose we have developed a set of plug-ins. Plug-ins that allow us to publish at the touch of a button.

What steps are involved and what is behind it in terms of software technology, we show in the blog post DITA blog publication via iiRDS to c-rex.net IDS.

Conclusion

Content is King

For us, the following principles have proven their worth in the process of creating our content:

Create high-quality input (in terms of content anyway, but also technically and structurally), then the rest will work by itself.
Use tools that help you with content creation.
These tools don't have to cost much or be elaborately implemented, because much is already there.

Following these principles, we set up our editing environment, chose plug-ins, developed automatisms.

That this was a good decision became apparent when it came to reorganizing our publication process. There we were well prepared!

In the other blog articles, we highlight the different aspects of converting our blog to iiRDS and c-rex.net IDS.