Will Sansbury

Yesterday, a coworker and I released a video overview we produced for a product that’s in our technical preview program now. The new product is fairly expansive, so we wanted to produce something that would help users to understand the product a little more quickly. With that goal in mind, it’s not extremely technical or [...]

My daughter, Lucy, was born on Thursday, 3/27, at 3:10 pm. Early the next morning, at her routine pediatric checkup, we learned that she was born with a congenital heart defect called transposition of the great arteries. She underwent open heart surgery yesterday, 3/31.
I’ve written much more about Lucy and the rough road she’s traveled [...]

I’ve been meaning to write up Jean-luc Doumont’s excellent Visual Structure workshop that I attended at STC Atlanta’s Currents 2008 conference.
With the birth of my second kid looming, I know I won’t find time, so here’s some sound bites from my notes.

Fight against sequencing.
The only cross-cultural issue that matters to doing business: what does “yes” [...]

This javascript automatically creates a mailto link with information about the topic in the subject line. Include this in your help systems for a quick and dirty response mechanism.
This script works by parsing the innerHTML value from the first H1 tag on the page, so it needs to be placed after the first H1 in [...]

This one comes in response to a question on the Author-it users’ forum from Kathi Bruce, who asked:
Is there a way to change the default to have the TOC expanded on open? We would like smaller books (with fewer Chapters and topics)to open with the TOC expanded, but to open larger books with [...]

When two topics have identical HTML file names and are included in the same book, Author-it generates a completely blank, zero-byte file by the shared file name.
There is no method within Author-it for tracking down these duplicate file names (the HTML file name field is not searchable).
However, if you’re using SQL server, you can [...]

This VB script sets the date on each topic to the last modified date from the Author-it database.

Add this comment to the top of the HTML template that generates your topics:
<!–
Topic
<pagetitle>
<authorit:SYS_MODIFIED>
–>

Add _SetLastModifiedDatesOnFiles.vbs to the list of additional files on your book or media object.
Then add
wscript _SetLastModifiedDatesOnFiles.vbs
to your AfterPublish.bat.
I also recommend adding
del _SetLastModifiedDatesOnFiles.vbs
to the [...]

Click the link below to add the Author-it users group to the search engines in your Firefox search toolbar.
Install - Version for Yahoo! groups search
Install - Version for searching on Hamish Blunck’s site

In response to a post by Ron C. Johnson to the Author-it users’ group, I wrote a Visual Basic script to generate an HTML file that contains a list of all topics and their last modification date.

Step one: Modify the custom HTML template to pass the information the VB script will need. Add this to [...]

I’m not usually one to toot my own horn, but when one of my help projects is directly cited as a positive in a product review, I can’t pass up the opportunity.
In WS_FTP Server Hones in on the Enterprise, Aaron Weiss wrote (emphasis added):
Pros: Intuitive Web administration; Flexible event-based rules; Well-written online help.
Since tech [...]