My Cantina

Articles displayed in the Search Results folder have always been a little troublesome because you had no idea what folder(s) they actually lived in, and there are times when that meta-information is important. We’ve tossed around various possible solutions to this, but have never been happy with any until just recently. During yet another brain-storming session the penny dropped that yes Search Results articles are the main problem here, but wouldn’t it be nice to know all the folders any article is in, besides the current one of course.

For those new to Surfulater you may not be aware that an article can be in as many different folders as you like, with there only ever being one real instance of any given article. This solves the age old problem of picking just “one best” folder for an article.

So after this thought sunk in, some more lateral thinking bore fruit with the end result being to add a new “In Folders” breadcrumb row to each of the article templates, as shown here.

This shows that this article is located in the Knowledge Base | Alternative Energy | Solar Power folder. Each of these three sub-folders is a clickable link which take you directly to the respective folder.

When an article is in more than one folder, each one of the locations is displayed:

In addition a link named Article is included for each folder, other than the current one. Clicking on this takes you to the article in its associated folder. This new feature lets you not only see each of the folders an article is in, but also to jump to each copy of it.

Furthermore these new “In Folders” breadcrumbs are displayed for all of Knowledge Tree views. This means that when you are viewing articles in the Tags or Chronological trees, you can now see what folders they are located in, and instantly jump to them in the Normal Folder tree view. This builds on the right click context menu item “Go to Article in Normal View” in the Tags and Chronological tree views and “Go to Article” in the Search Results folder. Each of these goes to the first article found in the Normal Tree view, whereas the new “In Folders” breadcrumbs enable you to go to any article, when it is located in multiple folders.

The final enhancement here is the update to the display of collapsed folders in the content window to match  the Articles new “In Folders” row as shown here:

Like all Article rows, the “In Folders” row can be moved up and down using Edit | Enable Template Editing. See the Help Topic: Power Features | Editing Article Templates for further information on this.
I am sure you will find these enhancements let you move around and locate specific copies of articles quicker and easier than ever before.

For details on the other updates in this release see the “V3 Release Notes” topic in the Surfulater Help. The Download is in the usual place.

Surfulater Version 3 has been officially released following review by our early access release testers. I provided a summary of the new features and enhancements in the last blog post and won’t repeat that here. Instead I’ll briefly cover some of the main new capabilities. Remember that the V3 Release Notes in the Surfulater Help go into detail.

Tagging is  the number one new feature in Version 3. This enables you to classify articles using single or multiple word tags and instantly locate them again. For example you could add the tag ‘Solar Energy’ to all articles related to solar energy and then access these in the new Tags Tree.

Adding Tags to articles is assisted by auto-suggest. Just type the first letter or two and a pick list will display all appropriate matches.

Select the tag you want from the list using the arrow keys and press Tab or Enter to use it. Or just click on it.

To add a new tag to the tags database simply enter it into the Article Tags field or use New Tag from the right click context menu in the Tags Tree.

Tags can be renamed, merged and deleted to build the set of tags you find works best over time. And tag maintenance tasks like rename happen instantly, unlike some other products.

You can also add tags to a set of articles in one go, and similarly remove tags from them using the new Tags… dialog.

Tags provide an alternate view into your knowledge base to the hierarchical folder tree. Taking an analogy with a Book, you can think of Folders as the Table of Contents and Tags as the Index. Well that is an epiphany I had recently.

See Tags and Tagging Articles in the Surfulater Help for a complete reference. You will also find several posts here on blog about tagging, along with some of the design decisions that were made.

The next big new feature in Version 3 is the ability to rearrange article layouts to best suit your needs. Out of the box a Web Template article has this layout:

But what if you would prefer to have say the Tags and Comments fields moved up below the Title. This is where Template Editing comes into play. Click on Edit on the main menu and you will see a new menu item:

Choosing Enable Template Editing puts Surfulater into a special mode that enables you to change the order of article rows by simply dragging them to the location you want and then dropping them, as shown in this screen shot.

When you have finished rearranging the rows click on the [x] on the Information Bar at the top of the content window to exit template editing.

This is a precursor to more advanced template editing and creation to come.

See Editing Article Templates in the Surfulater Help for a complete reference.

For full details about what’s new in Version 3 do read the V3 Release Notes in the Surfulater Help.

Surfulater Version 3 has been a while in the making and has broken with our regular steady stream of new releases, however there are very good reasons for this, of which you will hear about soon. Now that V3 and other tasks are behind us, you can expect to see more frequent releases again. In fact I’m already hard at work on the next release. And I’d really like to get blogging a bit more often again.

Neville

Surfulater Version 3 is finished and an early access release is being tested by small group of customers. It has been out for almost a week and no issues have been reported so far, which is good news.

We are working on updates to the Surfulater Web site and Web Shop and these are currently holding back the full public release of Surfulater V3.

This summary of new features and enhancements will give you glimpse of what you will see in V3.0.

• The ability to Tag Articles using multi-word tags and auto-suggest.
• A new Tags Tree to access articles by tags and manage tags.
• The ability to Tag multiple articles at once and remove tags from multiple articles.
• Template editing lets you rearrange article rows in the order that best suits your needs.
• A new Firefox Extension which communicates directly with Surfulater.
• Full Windows Vista IE7 Protected Mode support.
• The Firefox Extension automatically is installed and updated by Surfulater.
• Greatly improved Web page capture.
• New Note Article template added.
• Better performance when displaying all articles in a folder.
• Migration to an SQL Database commenced.
• Expanded context menus.
• Web Knowledge Base publishing issues fixed.
• All selected Knowledge Tree articles are now displayed in the content window.
• Thirty six new images have been added to the Knowledge Tree image selection pallette.
• The in-built Web Server has been extensively updated and enhanced.

Further all known issues in the V2.9x pre-releases have been resolved.

For the latest information on the Version 3 release see Surfulater Version 3 Released

There are some Web pages that don’t capture all that well in Surfulater. All of the page content is captured ok, but the layout can be a mess. I’ve been building a list of such pages (and web sites) as people report them and as I come across them. For example the BBC News web site should look something like this:

But in Surfulater Version 2.52.0.10 it looks like this:

This was one of the more important issues for us to address in the forthcoming Surfulater Version 3 release. It actually turned out to be more complex and difficult to resolve than I’d expected, but the good news is Web page capture is much better now. As proof here is the same page captured in what will be Surfulater Version 3.0.

An observant person may notice one small difference to the first image, but that aside the result is very good indeed. Note that these are all full Web page captures using Surfulater: Add Article plus Page or Surfulater: Attach Page to Article and we are viewing the attached web pages.

A related content capture issue is that some Web sites prevent images from being downloaded. This shows up when capturing selected content for Surfulater articles and when capturing full web pages. This screen shot shows the problem in Version 2.52.0.10

And this screen shot shows the same capture in Surfulater Version 3.0.

This proved to be another difficult issue that I am very pleased has now been resolved.

We continue to make good progress with Surfulater Version 3, with a release planned for September. I am heading up north to the Pacific for a much needed short break and to ever so briefly escape our cold winter. I look forward to wrapping up V3 upon my return, as I’m sure you all do to.

As mentioned a few posts back we have a shiny new Surfulater pre-release available for you to take for spin.

The focus of this release is the new  Tags dialog, which I blogged about in Tags - we need your help. Part 1.  Avi has written several follow on posts: Tags and Whitespace - more feedback requested, Tag Management Part III - adding new tags (I’m not sure what happened to Part II) and Tag Management - Live Example Page

We’ve received a lot of great feedback, which we thank you very much for. And we look forward to more.

After weighing things up we’ve settled on using the combined Add and Remove Tags dialog implementation I presented in Part 1, with a change to the Keep column, making it Remove, as suggested by Craig Prichard.

Avi has put together a sample presenting various alternate combinations (18 I think he said) in his Tag Management - Live Example Page post. Do comment on these.

In case you haven’t been following the recent flurry of recent articles, the new  Add and Remove Tags dialog enables you to quickly add new tags to a group of selected articles and remove tags from them. I don’t want to repeat the earlier discussions here, so please go and read those posts for details.

The Surfulater Help Topic: The Basics | Tags and Tagging Articles has been updated to cover the new Add and Removes Tags dialog and the Release Notes in the Help cover some of the other changes in this release. There is more going on under the cover, but we aren’t quite ready to talk about them yet.

Without further ado you can download the new release here.

Neville.

In response to the great feedback we have received, we felt it was worthwhile to put up a live sample page of Tag Management. It can be accessed here:

http://www.surfulater.com/tagsamples/TagMgmt.html

When you get to the page, you have options on the left as to how the Tag Management form will behave on the right. Here are the options and behaviours.

• Whitespace Handling: Separator means whitespace acts as a separator, so “cat dog” will become two separate tags. Allowed means whitespace is just another character and part of a tag, so “cat dog” will become just one tag. Auto-Convert means whitespace is not allowed at all, and will automatically convert to an underbar ‘_’.
• Remove/Keep Column: Keep means that the checkbox determines which tags to keep, with unchecked ones being removed. Remove means that the checkbox determines which tags to removed, with unchecked ones left as they are. 3-way means that the checkbox for each tags has three states: checked (keep on or apply to all selected articles); unchecked (remove from all selected articles); dash-checked or semi-checked (currently applies to some of but not all the articles).
• New Tag Add: Text Only means that new tags in the “New tags” textfield are not shown as new tags in the rows below, but stay in the textfield until you click “Save.” Add to Rows means that as soon as you hit enter from within the “New tags” textfield, the new tags are immediately added to the rows below.

Set your options on the left, click the “Update” button, and try out the features in the Tag Management form on the right.

We look forward to more of your great feedback.

Avi

Following up on the last two discussions, question #3 is as follows.

You add new tags in to the text field up top. Do those new tags get added to the rows at bottom, with the “Remove” checkbox empty? Or do they get added only when you click “OK”? Put in other terms, does the “New tags” textfield up top impact the rows at bottom even before you click OK (although not affecting the actual articles themselves until OK), or are the two activities separate?

For a good example of this, try the live sample we have posted (see the following blog post). The option is “New Tag Add.” To try it, select “Text Only” or “Add to Rows” followed by update. Then, go into the “New tags” textfield in the form, add some tags, and hit enter. In the case of “Text Only,” enter will do, well, nothing, since the new tags are only in the textfield. In the case of “Add to Rows,” all the new tags will be split on comma (and possibly whitespace, depending on your selection in the option of “Whitespace Handling,” and then be added to the rows.

Looking forward to your great feedback once again.
Avi

As a follow-up to the previous article on tag management, and the great feedback we have received, we would like to get your feedback on whitespace in tags.

Here is the question: is a space a legitimate character within a tag, or is it only a valid separator?

Why does it matter? Arguments for the jury, in favour of whitespace in tags or against it.

• Pro: Tags represent concepts. A concept is sometimes a single word, but sometimes multiple words that cannot be separated. If the tag is “dog animal”, really you are saying it is both a dog and an animal, and thus the two words are two concepts. If, on the other hand, the tag is “Sierra Leone”, (country in West Africa), this is one concept. It is not both in Sierra and Leone. We can think of lots of other examples where the two words together make one concept.
• Con: Most tagging systems do not allow whitespace, indeed, many treat it as a separator. In many tagging systems, if I type “cat dog” I will automatically get two tags, one cat and one dog, and the whitespace will be treated like an automatic separation. Wiki systems work similarly. For obvious reasons, maintaining maximum upwards compatibility with other tagging systems, or at least not locking us out, makes a lot of sense.

Here are our possibilities:

• Separator: Whitespace is a separator. If you type in “dog cat” or “Sierra Leone”, that is two distinct tags in each case. If you want to keep “Sierra Leone”, you need to manually and explicitly type Sierra_Leone, SierraLeone, Sierra-Leone or some variant. This is the del.icio.us method.
• Allow: Whitespace is allowed. If you type in “dog cat” or “Sierra Leone”, that is one tag in each case. For the “dog cat” case, if you want two tags, you will either need to type “dog” then hit an add button (or similar) then “cat” and add, or use a recognized separator, e.g. “dog, cat”. Obviously whitespace at the beginning or end of a tag name will always be ignored. This is the Gmail method.
• Auto-Convert: Whitespace is not allowed, but isn’t a separator either. Rather, every time you type in whitespace, it is automatically converted to an underbar ‘_’. So, if you type “dog, cat” you will get two tags, one of “dog” and one of “cat”. On the other hand, if you type “Sierra Leone”, you will automatically get “Sierra_Leone”. This is the Wikipedia/MediaWiki method.

One thing we definitely do not want is for there to be multiple options. Too confusing, and support is a nightmare, creating the worst of all worlds. Thoughts and feedback are always appreciated. If a working example would help, let us know in the comments.

Avi.

We are currently working on the next part of the new Surfulater Tagging capability and would like some guidance from you, our users. We are working on two new and related features that revolve around letting you add and remove tags from a group of selected articles. For example you might select six articles and then want to add one or more tags to these articles. Or you might want to delete a tag or two from them. To do this now you would have to select each article in turn and edit its Tags field, to add or remove the tags, which is cumbersome to say the least. 

There are ways to make this task a lot quicker and easier, which is the focus of this post. How are we proposing to do this? Lets start with adding tags. First you select all of the articles in the Knowledge Tree that you want to add some tags to, then right click on one and select Add Tags… from the context menu, which opens this dialog.

You can type in one or more tags, and auto-suggest lets you choose from the list of existing tags. When you press Save, the Tags you entered are added to the selected articles. Any tags already present in an article will not be added again, so you don’t end up with duplicates. This process works just like the Tags field in your Surfulater Articles.

Some tagging systems let you add tags by displaying a list of all available tags and getting you to tick a checkbox for each tag you want to add. This is simple, intuitive and works very well when you have a smallish number of tags. However as the number of tags you add grows, this quickly gets unwieldy and you spend more and more time scrolling back and forth through the list to locate and choose the tags you want.

Our approach of quickly locating tags using auto-suggest, and of adding new tags to the tags database at the same time, delivers a much better user experience, especially as the number of tags you use grows, which it will.

Now lets talk about removing tags from articles. Assume we have three articles with the following tags:

1. Cat, Pet
2. Dog, Pet
3. Cow, Herbivore

As before we’ll select all of the articles of interest, right click and choose Remove Tags… from the context menu which will open this dialog.

This shows a list of all of the tags in the selected articles, with duplicates removed. In this example Pet is in two articles, but only appears once in the list. Beside each tag is a checkbox, with the heading Keep? and all checkboxs are checked. To remove the tag Pet from the selected articles it is in, you uncheck its checkbox and then press Save. If you wanted to remove other tags at the same time, you would uncheck those as well, before pressing Save.

So far so good, or at least I hope so.

Our next step in evolving these designs was to look at a further simplification which would enable you to both Add and Remove Tags within the one dialog, starting from a single context menu selection Tags…. Most of the time you want to either Add or Remove, but there are times when you want to do both. The new combined dialog looks like this.

When Save is pressed in this example animal and herbivore will be added to the selected articles and pet will be removed. If the New tags field had been empty, no new tags would have been added. Likewise of no tags were unchecked in the list, none would have been removed from the selected articles. All quite straightforward.

On closer examination one issue became evident and that is there can be some confusion when a tag you want to Add is shown in the Existing Tags list. In our example this is the tag herbivore. 

When you notice herbivore in the list you might decide not too include it as a New tag, which would be a mistake. Referring back to the articles and tags summary:

1. Cat, Pet
2. Dog, Pet
3. Cow, Herbivore

you see that herbivore is only in one of the three selected articles, but there is no way to tell this from the Existing Tags list. Because you didn’t include herbivore in New tags, it won’t be added to articles one and two, which isn’t the desired outcome.

To help to resolve this we concluded that you need some indicator in the Existing Tags list which clearly shows which tags are in All of the selected articles and which are not. The outcome is this dialog.

Note the new In All… column, which in this example is completely empty, because there are no tags which are in all of the selected articles. After we press Save the story changes to.

You now see animal and herbivore are clearly identified as being in all of the selected articles. You can group the tags that are in all articles together by clicking on the In All… column heading. Now when you see a tag that you want to add is already in the Existing Tags list and it is In All articles, you can skip it if you want, or you might find it easier just to add it and let Surfulater look after things.

The bottom line is that there really isn’t any point in scrolling through a long list of Existing Tags to see if a tag you want to add is there or not, just go ahead and add it.

Where do we need your help?

First does this all make sense? Can you think of better ways to add and removes tags from a group of articles? Should we have separate Add and Remove processes or does combining them into one dialog deliver a better user experience? If so, does the combined dialog we’ve presented above, work for you?

Do you find the user interface for removing tags intuitive? Could you work out how to use it just by looking at the dialog or is it confusing or difficult to grasp?

Please do give us your feedback and help us make some important decisions on this aspect of tagging and untagging multiple articles at once. All our lines are open.

The Next Pre-Release

I am in the midst of wrapping up another new pre-release which will include the combined Add + Remove Tags dialog as described here. It should be available this week. Keep your eye on the Blog for details.

To be continued…

The Topic for this post says Part 1. We have an alternate combined Add/Remove dialog user interface on the drawing board, which we will present here as soon as it is ready, so stay tuned.

The next Surfulater Pre-Release, Version 2.92.0.0 is now available. If you haven’t already read about Version 2.91 and its Tagging goodness, I suggest you start there.

V2.92 addresses the pending issues noted in the Release Notes for the last release, namely Article Tags now copy when Articles are copied across KB’s, Search searches Article Tags and the Tags auto-suggest list vertical position is now correct when the Content window is scrolled.

We have also revamped the Tags Tree to remove the unnecessary root node, as well as the vertical lines that connect the top level tags. The image used for the nested sub-tags has also been changed, so they look different to the top level tags. This is what it looks like now.

These updates simplify and improve the look of the tree and make it easier to use.

We still have further work to do on Tagging, including the ability to Tag multiple articles at once, remove tags from multiple articles, show all UnTagged articles in the Tags Tree and more, so stay tuned.

If you held of installing the last pre-release I am pleased to report it has proven stable with no significant problems showing up.

Click this pre-release and do keep your comments and suggestions coming. Full Release Notes are in the Help as always.