Accessible Knowledge
Time to follow up on my last post about the new Surfulater Web site. The Web design company did a fantastic job, I really couldn’t be more pleased. I’ve performed a quick peer review and the feedback clearly indicates that the new site is a big and very worthwhile improvement. The design though is just one part of creating the new site. In essence it forms the template upon which the new site is built.
Continue reading “A quick glimpse at the new Surfulater Web site”
Following up from my last post I am very pleased to say we found a fantastic web design company for the redesign of our Surfulater.com web site. We actually finished up with a short list of a two companies, either of which I am confident would have done a good job. We have been working with the winning designer for a few weeks now and have gone through several iterations. About a dozen people have seen the initial design and the comments we’ve received have been overwhelmingly positive. I have no doubt that the new site will work much better for us than the current site.
The Surfulater Web site is overdue for a major makeover, both visually and its words. We aren’t doing a good enough job at quickly explaining what Surfulater does and why it can be so useful for people who spend any time doing research.
All PC users are faced with a never ending onslaught from rogues trying to gain access to their PC. They may want to steal your personal details or hijack your PC and use it to send out a flood of spam.
There are various things you can do to prevent such nefarious events from occurring.
Continue reading “Firewalls are wonderful things except when they aren’t.”
This latest release builds on Surfulater’s useability, especially when working with larger knowledge bases, it enhances Knowledge Tree Filters and provides an updated Surfulater Firefox Extension enabling Surfulater to work once more for clean installations of Firefox Version 3.6.
The current Surfulater Firefox Extension does not work if you do a clean installation of Firefox Version 3.6. If you upgrade to Firefox V3.6 from an earlier version of Firefox the Extension will continue to work correctly.
Continue reading “Firefox Version 3.6 and the Surfulater Firefox Extension may not work”
Surfulater Version 3.20.0.0 is now available and includes some great new features to end another great year of Surfulater development.
Our new Screen Clipper lets you capture any area of your screen and save it as an image in a Knowledge Base. You can create a new article which includes the screen clip or append screen clips to fields in existing articles.
Continue reading “It’s a wrap – Surfulater Version 3.20.0.0 released for Xmas”
The very short answer to this even shorter blog post is for you to go and have a look at this New Web site I’ve just finished the first cut of and the answer should reveal itself.
After that if you are interested in a sneak peak of a pre-release of Screen Clipper, let me know. You might also want to sign up to be notified when it is released. And if you have friends or colleagues who could be interested in Surfulater, tell them to sign up and take advantage of the special Surfulater discount we currently have on offer.
This is the main new capability coming in the next release, but there is more which we’ll let you know about in due course.
I was contacted by a long time ED for Windows customer yesterday who had visited our Surfulater Web site and commented on the quotes we have there, adding his own “Hope is not a plan”. I’d not heard this before and it took me aback thinking how appropriate it was in terms of Surfulater and more broadly anyone who uses a PC.
Most everyone with a PC spends time on the Internet, sometimes just stumbling almost randomly from site to site, but often searching for specific information to solve a particular problem. It could be researching the purchase of a new TV, Camera, Car etc. or trying to gather information on a medical condition, plan a family holiday, get help with a school assignment and on it goes.
We all know the Internet is an addiction and that we can and do spend countless hours trying to wheedle out every last piece of relevant information we can. But what happens with all this hard won information? For most people, not much. They’ll read as much as they can and do their best to absorb it. They may also set a bookmark in the hope they can find the page and content again, so they can research some more.
But “Hope is not a plan”; can you find the bookmark, if not, are you prepared to put the time and effort into trying to find the web page all over again. And if you do just happen to find it, will the content you think you saw before still be there now! Worse still the entire site may no longer exist.
The internet has the potential to greatly enrich our lives by presenting us with a wealth of incredibly useful information. Wise readers will plan to copy and keep this information, not hope that they may be lucky enough to find it again in the future. And there is a good chance they’ll use Surfulater to do just that.
“Hope is not a plan” is a truism that applies everywhere. People hope that the hard drive in their PC never dies, if it does they hope they have a “good” and recent backup to recover their many, many important documents, financial records, family pictures etc. They hope that if a fire comes racing through their house they will survive.
So the takeaway from all this is make plans, test the plans and work the plans, because “Hope is not a plan”.
Not a lot to say other than this release fixes a particularly nasty crash that has been in Surfulater since Tagging was added in Version 3.0. Thanks to Nick Kneen this finally came to light a week and a bit back and has now been fixed. This release also gets Ctrl+V, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X etc. working again when editing items in the Knowledge Tree. They broke in V3.16.0.0 as recently reported by Alexandros Deligiannis in our support forums. Other than that please see the Release Notes in the Surfulater Help when you install this new release. The download is available in the usual places on our Home and Download pages.