ITauthor

In a previous entry I talked about RSS aggregators. I mentioned NewsDesk 1.1 and SharpReader. Well I tried them out. But the one I went for was Abilon from SisyphSoft. Like most of aggregators that seem to be out there, it's a Java-based program, so you need to have the Java Runtime on your computer. If you don't already have it, you can download the Java Runtime from Sun's website (it 's a quick, click-through install). Abilon works well, especially if you have an always-on Internet connection. It's really a very simple thing. It has three panes. The left pane is a list of sites you're currently subscribed to. The right top pane is a list of articles for the site you select on the left. The right bottom pane shows the summary for the article that's currently selected. Usually the summary is just a single line of text. It depends what's in the RSS. Russell Beattie's Notebook puts the whole article in the summary, which I like. The Dilbert subscription (which comes with Abilon) has a Dilbert cartoon in the summary, which makes it easy to flick through them. When you click a link to the article or the site it opens up, by default, in a tab behind the main tab. This is a pain because you have to click to it, rather than seeing it straight away (that extra click irritates me!). You have to remember to close the tabs that are added with each link you click otherwise you're left with loads of them. I'd have preferred it to use the same second tab for all linked pages. A better option is to set it to use your default browser. It then opens a new browser window for each link. Again, I'd prefer it to use a single browser window, but at least, with this option, you're spared that extra click! Abilon comes preloaded with lots of subscriptions. These are quite good to get you started, and there are some good ones in there. But the first thing you'll want to do is wade through them, dividing the wheat from the chaff and deleting the majority of them. If you don't do this, Abilon will spend ages updating itself with pages you're not interested in. But I'd recommend it as my news aggregator of choice. I've quite a convert already – if only for reading Dilbert! You can, of course, add this web log to Abilon (or your news aggregator of choice) by adding this URL: http://www.itauthor.com/notes/index.rdf

I finally finished the home page for ITauthor.com last night. It's uploaded now and I've tested it on IE6, Netscape 7, Opera 7 and Firebird. I like to think it's an effective, minimalist design – nothing ostentatious, but it does the job I want it to do. Just for posterity (because I'll probably change it fairly soon) here's how it looks today: Read the rest of this entry »

I just got a regular technical authoring newsletter that mentioned that Adobe have issued version 7.1 of FrameMaker. Having spent about two months solid, earlier this year, trying to get FrameMaker 7.0 to round-trip to and from DocBook XML, without success. I thought this sounded interesting, although having spent so much time on it, I'm convinced it will take a pretty major rewrite of FrameMaker to turn it into a truly XML-friendly authoring tool. Anyway, I went and checked out what Adobe are saying about 7.1: Improved XML handlingâ € ”When you open an XML document in FrameMaker 7.1, the software retains the original XML format and â € œ.xmlâ €  file extension when saving. Cross-references to external XML and FrameMaker documents are retained when saving as XML. FrameMaker now provides the ability to use conditional text functionality when working with XML documents. Read the rest of this entry »

After wasting too much time scouring the internet for a way of positioning things accurately in Firebird/Mozilla and IE using only CSS, I've given in and gone for using two separate CSS files, with the following lines of JavaScript to direct the browser to the appropriate file:


OK, so I've given in. But at least now I can get on and finish off the page, which has been languishing, three-quarters-done, for about a week now. ITauthor.com will then, finally, have a proper home page.
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In my (seemingly never-ending) quest to find a way of spacing objects on a web page consistently in IE and Mozilla, using CSS, I came across an excellent web magazine called A List Apart. Its “About” page contains the following description: “For people who make websites” A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on techniques and benefits of designing with web standards. However, although it contains lots of good stuff, this didn't offer an end to my quest. I'm gradually, but reluctantly, slipping towards the Javascript detect and two stylesheets solution.