Subscribe to RSS
Posts Tagged ‘HTML’
Adding Google Analytics to your Author-it generated HTML pages
I’m learning about Author-it’s HTML templates today, and how to insert Google Analytics code (or any other code, really, such as adding an automatically updating variable for “Last modified by” with user or date information.)
But my task today was to insert Google Analytics code. (As a prerequisite note, we already have all our documentation available on an external site at docs.imis.com.)
First, I created a Gmail account for our department. Next, I created a Google account. Then, I went to the Google Analytics page and signed up for an account there, entering the name of our externally-accessible documentation site.
At the end of the sign up process, Google gives you javascript code that you want to place directly above the closing body tag </body>. Fortunately, the way that Author-it sets up the HTML templates, all of your Author-it topic data is inserted at a point where the <aitdata> tag appears in your HTML template.
The HTML templates are typically stored in C:\Program Files\AuthorIT V4\Data\Templates\Plain HTML, although other types of HTML templates such as DHTML and HTML Help templates are also available. These are the files I discovered that Google Analytics needed to be installed on.
- I edited the body_template.htm file and located the <aitdata> tag. I copied the code from the Google Analytics page and pasted it below the <aitdata> tag.
- I edited the html_frameset.htm file and added the Google Analytics code in the <head> area as instructed by the Google Analytics help, which, as a side note, has a set of completely question-based articles, as in, all headings are written as a question. Fascinating. The topic is “What should I know about using Analytics with Framed sites?“
Now, republish the HTML from your Author-it topics and your Google Analytics code is available on each page. After about 24 hours we started collecting data.
Let me know your experiences using Google Analytics to monitor your user assistance site traffic - what metrics are you seeking? Are there any conversion goals we should set up? One metric I am considering is trying to monitor how often the Word .doc files are downloaded. Does anyone have tips or tricks for us?
Update: I found this blog entry, Tracking document downloads in Google Analytics, and it contains hints at what I need to do to track our Word document downloads. However, I think that this article from the Google Analytics Help, How do I track files (PDF, AVI, or WMV) that are downloaded from my site? contains the method I’ll try first.
Wiki as forum, FAQ, HTML editor, XML editor, or CMS?
Wiki as the new FAQ
I discovered and have been meaning to write about Wiki is the new FAQ, an excellent blog post talking about SAP’s use of a wiki featured in an article in the Wall Street Journal. I especially like the play on words in the title. Reminds me of “brown is the new black” or “pink is the new blog,” hee hee.
A wiki can be a Frequently Asked Questions repository, much like the knowledge bases in their heyday in the late 80s. My favorite line from the blog entry has to be its closer: “It’s about a different way of thinking around how to interact with the community.” And that is what I have explored with my wiki presentation, about how to build community with a wiki and be an active member of that community. But what are other uses of the wiki?
Wiki as the next-generation customer forum
For many information seekers, wikis are better than forums because they are more easily searched and once you get a hit, the articles are meant to be scannable. Compare and contrast this to a long thread on a support forum where the answer to your question might be buried in the middle of a discussion about the mysterious beep in someone’s house. In my beep example, there are literally 78 pages of forum discussion, and if you read through the threads, you discover that a group of people took it upon themselves to go to the person’s house to find the beep. It has probably two years of forum discussion around the possibilities. Quite a fun and entertaining read, though, but not that efficient. Still, consider the community that built up around beep troubleshooting. Great stuff there.
But consider that your software users might not have the time to read through even a few pages of a forum discussion about a solution to their problem. That is where a wiki could be more useful than a forum. While forums are a fun online community for many, wikis might be the new generation of forum and many wiki engines offer comments on each article which are the next evolution of a forum - you can discuss the article itself. Another blogger, Leigh Blackall of Learn Online, discovered “The gold in a wiki is often in the discussion pages.”
Wiki as an easy HTML editor
Wikis originated as the quickest way to create a website without having to know HTML code. Really, wikitext is all about quickly doing headings, paragraphs, and lists.
Unfortunately each wiki has different rules for how to indicate a heading or list item or type of list. For some, it might be easier to just learn HTML code. And in the case of the Drupal CMS, there’s the ability to either use a rich-text editor or hand-code the HTML. It’s easy to troubleshoot when you can just view the HTML code, but what’s odd is that sometimes the resulting <div> tags generated out of your webform entries in Drupal seem to overlap.
But most wiki engines offer the fastest and easiest way to make a web page with a URL that you can consistently refer to.
Wiki as the new book
Some folks are pre-populating their wikis with book content, which is always an interesting test of what parts of a book are considered essential for “bookness” or “wikiness” - do you keep a table of contents? Is there any index? What page metaphors do you subscribe to in the wiki? These questions can be answered by looking for examples and analyzing their success. I especially like using wikis for the wiki aspects that go above and beyond books. For example, I’ve been exploring the Meatball Wiki site (Thanks Janet!) - and they have an excellent page with all sorts of Indexing Schemes categorized, such as Readership and Authorship which are fascinating for use in wikis as opposed to books. The Ontology category seems the most book-like to me, and I really like how that page offers ideas for all the possibilities that wiki offers.
Wiki as the new website
Does any company use only a wiki as its public-facing website?
Wiki as the new Content Management System
Eventually, the wiki can be the source files for important content, and I would guess there are people moving towards this wiki-as-cms system already. With my work with the OLPC project, I am learning more about wikis as source files, and found that the compare is actually quite powerful visually. Take a look at two versions of the demo or release notes from a release done in September. There is color coding and side-by-side comparison of text that is easily scanned for what changed, was added, or deleted. I’m learning so much about wikis for localization and translation efforts as well with the OLPC project. For example, this past week, I added links to translated content, such as the Spanish translation of the Simplified User Guide. The wiki engine itself (in this case, WikiMedia), lets me list the additional language pages in a blue bar on the original page, and then each language page automatically links back to the main language page (in this case, the English page.) Automatic is nearly always useful.
Do you see wikis being the next generation of other documentation outlets? Do tell.
Author-it webinar on version 5.0
Our team is so excited for the new Author-it version 5.0 that we invited other Austin techpubs teams over to our office to watch the US & Canada webinar. It was like a movie premiere. Okay, we’re not really that big of dorks. But we had a good time with it.
By my calculations, it was about four AM Australia time but both the presenters were troopers, even when the typed-in license key didn’t “take” during the migration portion of the demo. All of us in the room empathized with her and she smoothly avoided any delays.
I’m mostly excited about the new interface. And Australians New Zealanders say “ribbon bar” so sweetly. It’s such a nice update. I’m really looking forward to using it. The organization of styles and templates makes sense as well, and I am glad to have separation between paragraph styles and character styles.
The search bulk-ups contain the features my co-worker was looking for - search within a folder and match case or whole word. Also the search within a topic as a customizable panel pop-out is going to be highly useful. That new editor interface is especially exciting. It reminds me of XMetal’s editing environment.
We can’t wait to start trying publishing profiles. We wanted to just start clicking in the dialog boxes displayed during the demo. Their knowledge base says that eleven profiles are shipped right out of the box (mapped directly to publishing outputs). The output types I see in version 4.5 are DITA, Word, PDF, HTML, XHTML, HTML Help, Microsoft Windows Help (RTF-based), Java Help, Oracle Help, XML, and Author-it Website Manager format. Since that list adds up to eleven types, I guess there are no new outputs with this release.
While we don’t currently have a use for Author-it Xtend, I found it fascinating as a concept. Why would a techpubs department pay money to a vendor for an embedded search engine to try to encourage writers to re-use? Why not just spend that money in training (or hiring) writers to think more about topic orientation and re-usability?
My co-worker pointed out that in a translation situation, Xtend might pay for itself in one translation round. It seems so very Google-like. There’s this sliding bar for more Fuzzy matches and more Relevant matches. There’s color coding for matches. I’m automatically drawn to it like a moth to a back porch light, yet I’m not sure of the best applications for the search hits nor what problem teams should expect to solve with this functionality. Perhaps someone can tell me the best scenarios for this add-on?
We copied the Questions and Answers from the webinar, and people asked plenty of questions. Here’s just a sampling - does 5.0 run on SQL Server 2005 (yes), does it run on Windows Vista (yes), questions about the new Project Manager (purchased as a separate module but is integrated into 5.0), is the 5.0 upgrade covered by a maintenance contract (yes), can you upgrade from 4.3 to 5.0? (yes), are presentations part of 5.0 (yes), and the final question was a good comparison: Can I use the Filters (Variables) on the Publishing Profiles as I would have used conditional build tags in RoboHelp to include/exclude content from specific output types? Am I understanding this correctly? The answer: yes, that’s correct.
So, exciting new features abound and we can’t wait to get our hands on them. I’ll keep you posted on our progress.
