Each new year brings the promise of new beginnings. For my original DITA per Day blog at the contelligencegroup.com domain the past year had its share of bumps, and as a result the year 2015 will bring some big changes.

Foremost, the consulting company that Michael Boses and I began in 2012, Contelligence Group LLC, became a group of one as the year began. In late 2013 Michael Boses began a new job as a senior consultant at a Houston-based information management, technology consulting, and outsourcing company. Michael’s deep expertise with “XML authoring for the rest of us” was a valuable part of the original value proposition of our consulting collaboration and I miss working with him. Moving forward, I plan to transition to my own personal branding and to the kinds of services for which I’m uniquely qualified to offer.

On the personal branding side, I now plan to use http://ditaperday.com for work-related activities and blogging while moving more of my personal interest content (photography, personal writing, etc.) to my http://donrday.com domain. For now I will use my registered DBA name Learning by Wrote for business accounting, but the branding will happen around those domains with “Day” in them.

The past year had plenty of accomplishments, nonetheless. I presented some key messages around the value of structured content on the Web:

• February: Intelligent Content Conference, San Jose, “Connecting Intelligent Content with Micropublishing and Beyond“
• August: An Adobe Techcomm Webinar, ‘What the Demo DITA Specializations teach about Information Modeling“
• October: Information Development World, San Jose, “Repairing with DITA: the DITA to oManual Connection“
• November: Content Strategy Applied USA, San Jose,  “Closing the Gap on the Adaptive Content Challenge“

On that subject, I have been confirmed as a presenter for Intelligent Content Conference 2015 along with Jenny Magic of Sitegoals here in Austin; we’ve got some exciting ideas to help promote the use of adaptive, intelligent content (Getting Started with Adaptive Content).

I provided some interesting contract work for an Austin tech startup that needed some branding and style improvements for their DITA PDF and HTML deliverables. While investigating feasibility for migrating their content from Mediawiki to DITA I developed a tool that can take entire pages of the Daring Fireball Markdown project and convert them to a DITA map and clean topics. Part of this is now in a markupdown-to-dita initial authoring widget on Jotsom.com. More on this later on this tool as I clean it up for wider use in 2015.

And I launched a beta version of a demonstrator site, http://jotsom.com, which is a testbed for hardening the expeDITA web toolkit in preparation for donating it to open source. As I move it toward something more broadly usable, I’ll use this blog to discuss highlights and lessons learned.

Thus we have some ideas on what else may lie ahead for 2015. I’m looking forward to it, and I hope you are too. And I’m always available for advice and insights on how you may bring your content on this adaptive journey as well!

By the way, the header tabs on this blog are presently examples of DITA content rendered live as HTML pages in this WordPress context. For me, the functions that define the expeDITA toolkit are becoming more clear and more adaptable in other applications, and that is a Very Good Thing. I look forward to some exciting things to happen next year in as the story of structured, intelligent content continues to line up with the trends of adaptive content and Responsive Web Design.