I must say, however, that this year's scandals thus far take the cake. Plagiarism by a major author, inaction and then action by major publisher(s), epublishers going down in blazes of not so glory, and authors behaving badly in a whole new way.

I've been quiet on all of this. Not because I haven't had an opinion, because trust me, I have opinions. My health is bad...could be worse, but it's still not so good. I've had to take time away from blogging and writing and being the online presence that I was (Yes, I know, it wasn't much of an online presence to begin with) in order to focus on me and how to combat those health issues. I'll never be well, but I can NOT let these problems own me. Anyhow, I figured now was as good a time as any to come out of hiding and pour my opinions on the page.

Plagiarism = bad. 'nough said. I really don't think this needs any further elaboration. It is wrong to take another person's words and pass them off as your own. If you do, it will eventually come out and so you'd best be prepared to face the consequences.

Epublishers closing - not involved in this year's string of closures, so no real comment on them. I don't know the story, only what I've read on other blogs. It's sad to see more publishers closing and more authors left without a home for their work, but life goes on. There are other fish out there and more opportunities to be had. I wish all the authors luck.

Authors behaving badly. This one makes me mad and makes me sad at the same time. As a reader, I'm appalled by the behavior and, well, the same goes as an author, too. I've had several OMG! WTF? moments this year over the behavior of other authors, but the one that disturbs me the most is the report of an author actually stalking a reader for giving her book a 3 star review. It wasn't even a bad review. Well, not really. I've seen bad ones, and trust me, that one was quite nice in the way it was worded and she even said she had liked the previous book. What does the reader get in return? Threats not only to her but to her family--HER KIDS. There's just no excuse for that. It's wrong on so many levels that a simple, "I'm sorry. I was wrong." won't even begin to cover it.

Reviews. They can make an author smile or dance around the room all giddy like. They can also reduce an author to tears. There will be good reviews, just as there will be bad ones. It's part of the game. When you write a book and put it out there for the world to read, there will be those who do not like your words. It's life. It's to be expected. Suck it up already. Crying over spilt milk doesn't make the spill go away. Bitching, threatening, screaming, and having a tantrum only serve to make the bitcher (is that even a word?) look bad and put that person on the DO NOT BUY list, which is where no author wants to be. Readers are to be cherished. I'm not saying bow down to their every whim or write a book JUST for them (you can't please them all and what one likes, another will hate). What I am saying is not to berate them for not liking something.

I really hate seeing "Did we read the same book?" comments. Yes, I'm sure you probably did read the same book, but you interpreted it differently. It struck different chords with you, and that's okay. It's part of what makes us human--different. We're not all going to like the same things. It's a fact of life. If you obsess over every little difference of opinion, you've got your work cut out for you. If you go after a reader with both barrels blazing, odds are you'll lose a lot of otherwise loyal readers in the process. And yes, a loyal reader is allowed to not like all your books. Example? I love author X. I have all of author X's books. Do I love all of author X's books? No. Some of them just didn't speak to me like the others or had little things that annoyed me in them. Will I stop reading author X because of this? Not in the least. IF author X acted like an ass and stalked a reader for not liking on of her books, you better believe that I'd stop reading her.

Bullying in any way, shape, or form is bad. As a kid I was bullied EVERY DAY at school by one girl. To this day, I cannot stand her, even though I haven't seen her in years. What did I do? I took it, because that was my nature. I'm not a confrontational kind of person. I'm quiet and shy...painfully shy. Honest, I am. It's a character flaw, I guess you'd say. But, I'm no longer that school girl. I'm a whole other person now. I finally realized I was too old to let this crap get to me any longer. So I now defend myself when needed. I have to stop letting every little thing bother me...and that's not just in writing, but in every aspect of life. I'm still painfully shy, don't think that will ever change, but I am a bit more outspoken than before--at least in text. However, when I get a bad review, I don't go hunt down the reviewer.

Books are not babies. This is a tough one to get the hang of and learn. When we first start writing, those books are our everything. We've poured heart and soul and countless hours into shaping that story into the shining gem we believe it to be. We preen over it and are so proud. Then that first critical review comes out and it's like a shot in the heart. What? Not like my baby. MY BABY! How dare you! It's like having a stranger walk up to you in the store and say your kid is ugly. It's just unthinkable. But wait. It's just a book. Not a baby. No one said your kid was ugly. All that was said was that your WORDS didn't move the reader. That's okay. It's not a reflection against you personally. (I won't get into the occasional personal rant review, that's a whole 'nother ballgame there)

Yes, we pour emotion and hard work and countless hours into writing a book. I adore all my characters that I create. I enjoy crafting each story, but once it's through edits and out for public consumption, it's not my baby anymore. It's open to criticism and that's a fact I have to live with. Yes, I sometimes wonder why a reviewer felt a certain way, but I don't email her questioning her every statement. Some reviews can be helpful, some not so much. But that's part of the game as well.

Anyhow, I suppose I've rambled on for long enough. Hopefully, I made my point. If not, leave a comment and ask. I'm sure I can come up with more to ramble on about on the subject(s). :)

Customers love video embedded in the online help. Time saving for them, and no need to attend a training class. Her customers love it, love it, love it.

Tool kit she uses - Camtasia studio, Framemaker, and WebWorks ePublisher.

Need a script - but you might already have it, like a list of steps in a task.

Annoyance - don't take your whole desktop while capturing screencasts. "Your desktop icons are like seeing your underwear on a clothesline." :)

Also, don't show the time of the day (like 4:00 AM) that you captured the screens, it's sort of too much information.

Sizing of about 320 by 240 is about the right size for YouTube. Or 480x360 if you need something slight larger. If you're delivering the video on a hard drive (installed as part of your product), you can make it even bigger. But for Internet or CHM deployment, keep it small.

Record audio first, then replay the audio while you record the video - the timing will be easier to get synched up.

She likes to use a "highlight click" feature that shows a subtle red circle showing where you click on the screen. She also modifies the cursor so that it's larger and a yellow color while capturing the screencast.

She "cropped" out the first part of the video where she moved the screen around to the optimal location.

She recommends Flash for video output (.swf file). But if you know people are using Windows, you can make Windows Media files. If you know they'll only be played back on an iPod, make a QuickTime file. If you want to send these video files to someone else and they don't have Camtasia, save them as AVI - they'll be larger files but the recipient will be able to compress them as needed and make another format. Also, any video editing software can edit AVI files.

If you want to use embedded video within an HTML file, don't use Flash, however.

Goes into Frame, creates relative path to the movies (which is in Files folder within the ePublisher directory system), then generates the HTML using ePublisher.
She uploaded javascript to the WebWorks wiki that writes the embedded video code in on the fly, so that Internet Explorer doesn't put a popup in front of the user, complaining about the embedded object.

In the javascript call to the video file, she's adding an extra 10-20 pixels to the height dimension so that the player bar shows up at the bottom.

She uses conditional text in FrameMaker called "Passthrough" for all her javascript code so she can put it right into her FrameMaker file.

I'm attending as many sessions as I can at the Quadralay WebWorks User Conference - called the WebWorks RoundUp. Right now I'm listening to a great demo using WebWorks to publish Word or Frame source files to wikitext.

Start with WIF

The WebWorks wiki defines WIF as WebWorks Intermediate Format - basically their Document Type Definition. Serendipitous search engine love for WebWorks. I hadn't realized that when you Google "WIF" you'll find there is a lot of academic call for the Wiki Interchange Format - a lowest common denominator of wiki content exchange. WIF defines a subset of XHTML as an over-the-wire format for wiki content exchange.

Keep it simple

He's demonstrating the concept with headings and paragraphs only, but I would imagine that ordered and unordered lists would be simple, even nested indented lists are simple enough to mark up.

No tables, and I'll admit, they're a nightmare to markup in wikitext, so I sure wouldn't tackle writing the XSLT to create tables from XML to wikitext.

Graphics you could create the wikitext for the file reference, as long as you take the time to upload the graphics to the location where the wiki is expecting them.

Generate the wikitext

He's generating wiki markup using XSLT transforms that he has already set up.

Wikitext markup is really simple, using ASCII characters such as == heading text == to mark up a heading. In this example markup, more equals signs surrounding the heading indicate a deeper nesting of headings. Two equals signs indicate a heading 2, three === indicates a heading 3. Paragraphs are often not marked up at all, making them the simplest output of all. Refer to the wikimatrix.org's markup comparison tool for more examples.

I would have liked to see examples of links and image references created, but this was an hour demo after all. :)

Put wikitext into your wiki

Finally, he's copying and pasting the marked up wikitext into his wiki. For a long article where one page is one article, this approach makes a lot of sense. I could use a tool like this for the One Laptop Per Child project, where we have a Simplified user guide all in one wiki page. Each section is editable just because the wikitext is marked up using ==section name==, which is the markup for that particular wiki (MediaWiki).

And in his keynote the following day, Ben Allums demonstrated that he could publish to the wiki itself. Now THAT is an exciting development. I'll dig deeper into the guts of that and report back.

Scenarios for converting to wikitext

I can think of plenty of scenarios for using this conversion process. Let's say you need a hundred page user manual put into wiki format. This type of conversion would give you a huge leg up on the pre-population of a wiki with a user guide that is already in FrameMaker or Word. I would imagine you could somehow automate the webform population. For example, use IBM's freely available CoScriptor to record the process where you create a new wiki page, then just run the CoScriptor script and paste when needed, then run another script that renames the new wiki page.

Because you can also publish directly to the wiki, but it seems to be in a way that doesn't touch what's already there, this method is a great way to continually update your wiki with fresh content.

Another great use of creating wikis with a conversion process would be for API documentation, especially if you already had a large body of work in a wiki. Let's say you're using DITA as your source file for your API, convert new portions to wikitext.

Any other scenarios for this conversion tool?