Something Ann Gentle said on the Communications from DMN podcast made me think about they way I use blogs and forums. This is especially relevant right now as I’ve got variations of the same question sitting on three forums.

What she said (about 24 minutes into the show), while discussing Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s book Groundswell, was:

There’s this ladder of involvement in social media. Some people like to write blog entries. Some people only like to comment on blog entries. Some people like to review products. Some people just like to read other people’s reviews and act on that review.

I’m an occasional blogger. Sometimes I’ll post every day, other times months will go by and I don’t post at all (usually when I’m up to my eyeballs at work). In some ways I admire the committed bloggers who write lengthy and well thought out posts every day without fail – and sometimes more than one a day. But I do often wonder why they’re spending so much time and thought on this rather than on their paid employment, or their family.

I’m also an occasional blog reader. I use Feedblitz to mail me posts from lots of blogs, but a lot of the time I just read the summaries and never the whole blog post, or I just delete the email without reading anything. My reason for not reading more blog posts is that I know that if I didn’t ration myself quite strictly I could easily spend several hours a day doing nothing else but reading blogs.

What I’m not is a commenter. I rarely ever comment on blog posts and as for forums, I can’t remember ever answering a question on a forum. And this makes me feel bad for two reasons:

1. I love it when people email me, or add a comment to my blog, with a point about something I’ve said in a post, or on a podcast. However, I rarely ever contact the writers/hosts of the blogs/podcasts I enjoy reading/listening to regularly. So they never know I’m out here, one of an invisible audience, enjoying their work. I really should do something about that!
2. I don’t use forums except as a last resort – at which times they often prove invaluable. I have some questions out in forums at the moment as part of my search for the right online help architecture/method for our new applications. And I remember back in 2002 when I was doing some pretty hairy stuff with RoboHelp, I got a lot of help on the Help forums from people like Rick Stone, Rob Chandler and Char James-Tanny. But I’ve never felt any inclination to become an MVP of anything myself and watch the forums on the lookout for people to help.

Am I just a bad, self-centred person?

Well, no, I don’t think so. For me it’s all about a balance of guilt. I hate spending much time at work doing anything that’s not what I’m being paid to do. I pretty much feel like my company has bought my time from nine to five (with an hour off for lunch) and therefore they own my labour during those hours and if I’m writing a blog post or helping someone on a forum I’m essentially cheating my employers. So I make every effort not to be drawn into this kind of thing, and if it does happen I make sure I work extra hours at the end of the day to make up for it. I think this is the generations-old Calvinistic influence showing through.

And when I’m not in work I feel guilty if I spend too much time blogging or preparing podcasts, because I have a wife and kids who deserve some of my time and attention. So once I’ve done some blogging and some podcasting, that just doesn’t leave much time for anything else that would take me away from my family.

Or maybe I’m over-complicating things. Maybe, as Ann Gentle suggests, it simply that there are some people who mainly just blog, some people who mainly comment and some people who never blog or comment.

About six years ago we got a new manager at work and he had trouble with all the names and acronyms we use. He asked me to put together a Web page of terms and explanations for our intranet. But - without doing any consumer research - I thought I’d go one better and, using a vast amount of home brewed Perl and Javascript, I construct a Glossary site that was essentially a Web front end for a little database. Anyone in the company could add new glossary terms and definitions or edit existing ones. I spent quite a bit of time on it (my own personal time because the guilt thing prevented me from effectively charging the company for my work on this), and the end product was pretty damned good and did things like emailing specified addresses every time a change was made (because I was a little bit worried that a loginless system would tempt someone to go in there are write scurrilous definitions). However, in six years, although I know people (mainly new-starts) refer to it, no one but me ever adds or changes anything. It’s exactly like me and Wikipedia. On average I probably use Wikipedia a few times a week and have done for years. But I’ve never ever edited or added a single thing. I’m not proud of this, I’ve just never felt any desire or obligation to do so.

Communications from DMN:
Talking shop with Anne Gentle

Due to the lack of any response to my question on the Content Wrangler forum (http://thecontentwrangler.ning.com/forum/topics/how-can-i-deliver-serverbased – see also my previous post), I’ve been digging around trying to find out more about Madcap’s .NET Help. This isn’t easy as Madcap have not published much documentation for it (although there is an SDK that presumably tells developers what they need to know – but doesn’t help me, as a technical author).

So I’ve been having a dig around on Madcap’s forums and I came across a really interesting discussion (starting in November 2006 and, currently, ending in December last year). This centres around Madcap’s in-your-face branding of their .NET Help Viewer. It had the following problems:

• A big Madcap splash screen that was displayed every time you started up the help,
• Madcap branding on the title bar of the Viewer – rather than the name of the help project.
• Madcap branding in the Help menu called from within the Viewer.

There is much lively discussion in the string of messages. One contributor makes the point that there is no earthly point in Madcap promoting themselves in a Help system that is not going anywhere near anyone who would ever buy, or be remotely interested in, Flare or any other technical authoring application. Another contributor makes the point that I’m sure I would face: customers running a mission-critical IT system do not want to see a big, jokey splash screen suddenly appearing. It reeks of malware! Even the name “Madcap” would set teeth grinding if it appeared in the applications my company produces.

Finally, bowing to the weight and vehemence of the postings, Madcap gets around to providing a way of disabling the splash screen – but no word on configuring the title bar text and icon. As for the help menu, I think there’s a workaround.

One of the interesting things, reading through this, was the exasperation evident in the postings. People really, really wanted to use this product but were unable to because Madcap couldn’t go that extra mile (or 100 yards) for them. And the change from vitriol to delight and gratitude when Madcap staff contributed to the discussion with some positive news was quite touching, although it did seem a bit like: “Thank you for making it possible for us to use your product!”

I posted the following question on the Content Wrangler forum yesterday, but returning to it today I notice that most of the other posts to the forum get zero responses, so I’m going to repeat this appeal for ideas here, and I’ll try and think of other places I might pose the question.

I'm hoping for some advice on a way to provide server-based online help. The trouble is it can't be Web-based. Does anyone know of something out there that would solve this problem?

We've got a client/server software application that needs user assistance. It can't be traditional client-side HTML Help because this leaves help files on the PC, which not good for us because of the confidential nature of parts of the IT system. For a similar reason (plus some technical reasons) it can't be Web help.

What I'm looking for is a help viewer that will be launched from within a client application but which will fetch it's help topics from the same secure server used by other parts of the application. The help viewer can be located on the client side, but the help topics must be pulled down from the server.

I have had a look at Adobe AIR Help, but this seems to download files to the client and leave them there for use next time, which is no good for our purposes. I have also had a look at Madcap Flare's .NET Help, but I think this is also client-side, plus Madcap supplies very little information about .NET Help which worries me because I'd rather not migrate to a system/method that is poorly documented (unlike HTML Help or Webhelp output from Flare, which is well documented).

So I'm looking for ideas. Am I missing something obvious? Can anyone suggest a solution? Please post a comment below.

Demo videos are great, but if they promise something and don't tell you the full story, and they successfully get you to invest your time or money when the reality doesn't match up to the demo, then they can really just set a product up for a fall. This is true of TextFlow. The demo video makes it look great. What it doesn't tell you is that there are some important things it can't do.

It just so happened that, today, I'm collating some review comments on some release notes I wrote. I have three copies of a Word document and I need to merge the comments into a single document. The TextFlow video promised that it could do just what I was needing to do and would make my life easier. I therefore took the time to register for the beta and install the software.

The problem when you try it out is that TextFlow destroys the formatting in your Word documents and any images and tables simply disappear.

Now, okay, it's beta software. But Google and others have changed the definition of beta software. Just a few years ago "beta" meant the software was well short of release quality and you could expect it to contain bugs and missing chunks of functionality. The Gmail beta is an example of software that was perfectly usable, and used day in day out by millions of users, for a long time while it was still labelled a beta.

TextFlow, on the other hand, is an old-fashioned beta. Interesting to try out. But not much use for any serious use yet. The real problem is that the demo has left me seriously hacked off, with a very negative feeling towards the makers of TextFlow. If they'd just been a bit more honest about what the product can't yet do I wouldn't be left feeling duped by the video.

Five years ago yesterday I wrote a blog post in which I mentioned Xenu Link Sleuth. I was reminded of this because someone recently commented on another old blog post of mine, about Longhorn Help, saying that a link I'd included to the Longhorn Help reference pages in MSDN was broken.

I thought it would be interesting to check how many other broken links there were throughout my blog. I remembered writing about a link checker and a quick search revealed it was almost exactly five years ago. More interesting though is that the a) the Web page for Xenu looks just as I remember it in 2003 b) you can still download Xenu free of charge c) it runs fine on Vista and d) although it's a no-frills application it's an extremely thorough and effective way to identify broken links buried deep within a Web site. 

One nice feature is that at the end of the check you can output a report as a Web page that contains list of all the broken links and the pages they appear on (which you can click on to check the page) and another list of all the pages containing broken links - it's useful to have both orders because you probably want to check through page by page, but it's also useful to identify multiple broken links for pages on a particular domain.

Download Xenu from here:

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Download

There's an interesting page about The Story of Xenu Link Sleuth which reveals how the program was written by Tilman Hausherr in 1997.

Incidentally, when I ran it against www.itauthor.com today, Xenu reported that I had 2363 links, and just under 200 of them are currently broken: