Let me start by wishing everyone a very merry xmas and a prosperous and healthy 2008. I’d also like to thank everyone for the great support you’ve given to Surfulater and myself this past year. Your e-mails and forum posts praising Surfulater and also being critical, from time to time, are always very well received and help keep us on course. We have lots more to do with Surfulater in the coming year. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed as the new releases continue to deliver more capabilities as well as enhanced functionality, while hopefully remaining true to our goal of ease of use.
Actions speak louder than words, so let me show you the big new feature in this release;Â click here*.
If you’ve been reading the blog, this won’t come as a surprise. If you haven’t, then what you are seeing is the sample Surfulater Knowledge Base displayed in your Web Browser. What does this mean? Well it enables you to Publish your Knowledge Base files and view them in a Web Browser, without any need to have Surfulater present.
Various uses quickly come to mind.
- You can carry your KB’s around on a USB Stick and view them on any PC, which has a Web Browser. No other software is needed.
- You can Publish them to a PC on your Network (LAN) for others on the Network to access.
- And as you’ve just witnessed you can put them on a Web Site, for anyone with Internet access to see.
This new Web Publishing capability makes it easy to share your content with friends and colleagues and paves the way for even more interesting new ways of working with knowledge bases in the future. You can think of it as setting your content free.
It is clear from the comments in my previous blog post, that this is a very important step in Surfulater’s evolution.
For more information see View Surfulater KB’s in any Web Browser, wherever you are, read the Help file topic Power Features|Publish to a Web KB and read the Release Notes in the Help or here.
Well that’s it for now and probably for 2007. Have a great Xmas and do let me know what you think of the new Web KBÂ publishing capability.
Neville
* To view Web KB’s Javascript must be enabled in your Web Browser. To view Web KB’s on a Local Drive, IE users need to either enable: Tools|Internet Options…|Advanced|Allow active content to run in files on My Computer or select ‘Allow Blocked Content’ from the context menu when prompted.
I can’t wait to try this out!!
Thanks so much…
Have you got Help up yet?
Perry, I look forward to you trying it out as well.
I wanted to get this out before Xmas and ran out of time to get Web Publishing working with the Help. The Help is slightly different to user KB’s in that its images are in the Surfulater.exe file, not the WDB’s. I doubt whether it will take long to do though. Stay tuned.
This is a really cool feature! Now the next step is make it *editable* from within a browser! I’m really glad I moved over to Surfulater from SurfSaver many moons ago.
When will you have a version of Surfulater that can run entirely from a USB drive? That would make it a truly universal knowledge manager.
Just a note to say congratulations on making this available in time for Christmas! I am also very pleasantly surprised that the web published knowledge base now works with Opera as well. Brilliant work once again, as we’ve come to expect 🙂
All the best for the festive season, alx
Outstanding, congratulations, Happy Holidays, and a Wonderful New Year to you, Neville!!!
With this new release, you have closed the ‘wish list’ gap for those of us Onfolio Refugees who have longed for a way to publish our Surfulater KBs!
This energized me to — after a respectful delay to savor this wonderful new release — to hit the Surfulater forums to voice my two or maybe three wish list features to get your creative mind ruminating on them for possible inclusion in updates for 2008.
Thank You and Have a Happy New Year!
@Carl. Yes it is cool and oh so useful. Re. editing within the browser – who knows what the future will bring. 🙂 Agreed a USB version would be good and is planned. There are various tricky technical issues, including licensing, which need to be resolved.
@Alexander. Thanks and thanks. The pressure is always on during a new release and having Xmas in the mix doesn’t help much. It was great to be able to give everyone another present for their Xmas stocking.
@Jim. The new Web KB isn’t quite what you’d written about on the forum, but so far everyone is very happy with the end result, including me. And it is great to win a goal for you OnFolio refugees.
Best wishes to all for the holiday season and take care.
That is *TOTALLY* awesome! In my opinion that is the very best thing I’ve seen in a while. This rips the top off “What can I do with SUL?” and makes it … geez it makes it anything you need. Very cool!!!
Nice!! Will you be adding a “search” feature for the published Web KB?
Kevin,
Thanks for the heads up. Not sure about search, it could be difficult to implement in this non-web server implementation. But I’ll definitely look into it.