http://www.willsansbury.com Technical writer, user experience advocate, designer & photographer Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:14:29 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've been a fan of Alan Cooper and of agile development for a while, but I've never been able to connect the dots between the two. At this year's Agile Conference, Cooper himself tried to connect the two in the closing keynote of the conference. Here's his slides and speaker notes. ... http://www.willsansbury.com/2008/08/08/cooper-agile/ 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, ... http://www.willsansbury.com/2008/06/24/34/ 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 ... http://www.willsansbury.com/2008/04/01/lucy/ 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 ... http://www.willsansbury.com/2008/03/24/visual-structure-workshop-sound-bites/ 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 ... http://www.willsansbury.com/2008/02/25/automatic-e-mail-link-with-topic-information/ 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 ... http://www.willsansbury.com/2008/01/03/author-it-expand-toc-completely-when-web-help-is-opened/ 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 ... http://www.willsansbury.com/2008/01/02/author-it-tracking-down-duplicated-html-file-names/ 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 ... http://www.willsansbury.com/2007/12/19/author-it-change-date-on-published-html-files-to-the-last-modified-date-from-author-it/ 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 http://www.willsansbury.com/2007/12/17/author-it-user-group-firefox-plugin/ 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 ... http://www.willsansbury.com/2007/12/10/author-it-generating-a-list-of-topics-with-date-of-last-modification/