The reason why I’m a bit busy…

Here is the reason why I have been hard to get hold of recently. On February 9th, 2010 I was blessed with a lovely little son.

Naturally the world revolves around him right now so I will probably keep a low profile with posts and answers to comments for a while now. Prior to his birth I was confident that I would be able to continue with my activities when he was sleeping, but now I realise that I was over confident..

I have tried to get him interested in Adobe Captivate already, but right now it seems like eating, sleeping and pooping are higher on his priority list.

/Michael

New blog design launched

Well I can almost tick off one of my to-do’s for 2010 now since the new design of my site is live ;o)

I still have a few things I need to fix before I am 100% happy with it but that should be done within the next week or so. Mainly it’s some CSS issues/tweaks and some graphical work.  

I also have some weird stuff going on with the Avatars on the page – It’s not working like I want it to so I need to figure out where that went wrong.

All in all I’m pretty happy with the result. I think it’s more “clean” and easy to look at.

In case you encounter any weird behaviour or obvious bugs with this new design I would appreciate it if you leave a comment here to this post.

/Michael

AS2 Email Widget for Adobe Captivate 4

This widget was created based on a request in the Adobe Forum – http://forums.adobe.com/thread/535691?tstart=0

This widget will allow you to send an email in the background to a predefined address. It will send an email once the widget is “played” on the Captivate timeline.

It will send an email with the subject “Mail sent from Captivate e-mail Widget” and it will send you the users name. (of course the user needs to enter his name in Captivate).

It relies on the widely available CGI / Perl script FormMail (www.formmail.com). This is a free open source script that is pre-installed on many webhosts.

If you don’t have this installed on your webserver you can install it yourself by following the instructions located here: http://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html

The widget has two paramenters that needs to be set.

1. THe recipient email address. The default settings in the FormMail script dictates that this must be an email on the same domain as from the the script is exectuted. In other words – if I use the widget in an Adobe Captivate project located on my domain www.cpguru.com it can only send emails to xxx@cpguru.com.This functionality can be changed in the FormMail settings if needed so you can define more allowed domains to send email to.
2. The location of the FormMail script on your webserver. The location is usually something like http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/FormMail.pl but that depends on how and where your Webhost installed it (if it’s preinstalled) or where you installed it yourself. Also keep in mind that cpguru.com and www.cpguru.com are technically two separate domains so make sure you have the correct path for your own domain.

How to use the Email Widget for Adobe Captivate:

First of all ensure that you have FormMail installed on your Webserver and that it is working.

The only requirements that the widget have is the two parameters mentioned above and a variable called v_email that needs to be set in Captivate.

Process in Captivate:

1. Create a user defined variable called v_email
2. Create a Text Entry Box and associate the v_email variable with that.
3. Insert the widget in Captivate anywhere after the Text Entry Box.
4. Define the two parameters in the Widget Parameters Tab
5. That’s it.

Now you will receive an email everytime someone accesses your Captivate course. The email will contain the following information:

Below is the result of your feedback form.  It was submitted by

 () on Friday, December 18, 2009 at 10:37:38

—————————————————————————

userID: Michael

—————————————————————————

In case you do not recieve an email then chances are that the error is with the FormMail script (or the link to the location of the script). I cannot provide support on anything FormMail related so I recommend that you look at http://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html where everything in regards to the FormMail script is described in detail. 

Download the Email Widget:

Here is the link to download the widget.

The download package also contains a sample Captivate project. The FormMail script is not supplied due to license restrictions, but you can download it yourself for free on http://www.formmail.com/

Please note – the widget is supplied as is. The widget worked flawlessly in all my tests, but this is no guarantee that it will work for you.

Blog maintenance

I did some much needed maintenance on my site tonight. My webhost have been having some problems with their delivery speed of pages the last couple of days and the database on this site was getting massive so I thought it would be a good idea to clean up the database a bit. One of the tables had 176.000 entries so that one was getting out of hand ;o)

Well I cleaned up the databases and I also disabled user registration once again. It seems like 99.5% of the people actually registering are either Russian or Chinese spammers anyway and since there is no real benefit for users to register I might as well turn it off.

I also upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress and removed a couple of plugins and optimized all the database tables. All in all it should make the site load a bit quicker.

Next project for the site will be to get a new layout since I’m getting a bit tired of the current one. This is a major project though so I don’t think it will happen before early 2010.

/Michael

Adobe Captivate 4 Quiz Widgets (AS3)

The developer team behind Adobe Captivate posted some widgets on their blog a while ago. These widgets can be used to manipulate the way that your quizzes behave and look.

 The widgets should be inserted on your first slide and set to “display for rest of project”

Read the full post and instructions here: http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2009/09/widgets_to_streamline_your_qui.html

Download Widget to hide the skip button

Download Widget to hide the clear and submit button

The widgets are AS3 widgets so you can only use them in Adobe Captivate AS3 projects.

/Michael

AS3 DomainLock Widget for Adobe Captivate 4

I have created an AS3 version of the DomainLock Widget for Adobe Captivate 4. This widget will allow you to lock your Captivate content to only play on the domain(s) that you authorize.

In the AS3 version you have the option to authorize multiple domains to play your content. You can also define a custom stop message that will be displayed if the domain check fails.

Requirements

The component uses ActionScript 3.0 and requires at least Flash Player 9 to work. Adobe Captivate 4 is also required.

Demonstration

Example of an Adobe Captivate project playing from an authorized domain:
http://www.cpguru.com/demonstrations/domainLockWidget(domainOk)/domainLockWidget(domainOk).htm

Example of an Adobe Captivate project playing from an unauthorized domain:
http://www.cpguru.com/demonstrations/domainLockWidget(domainNotOk)/domainLockWidget(domainNotOk).htm

The example above on the unauthorized domain is set to accept “localhost” as the domain so if you were to download this movie it would play on your computer locally, but not on any other domain or intranet.

Buy the component

Single User Licence (US$ 20)

The single user licence grants you, the Purchaser, a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to make use of and display the product that you acquire but limited to either your own personal use or for projects within the company where you are employeed.

You are allowed to use the product as many times as you like for personal use or for projects within your company / organization. However, if you use this product in a one of your projects with the intent of resale to a client outside of your company / organization you are required to repurchase the product the appropriate number of times or purchase an enterprise license.

Multiple User Licence (US$ 100)

The multiple user licence grants you and any number of employees of your company / organization, a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to make use of and display the product that you have acquired to either your own personal use or for projects within your own company.

You are allowed to use the product as many times as you like for personal use or for projects within your own company / organization. However, if you use this product in a one of your projects with the intent of resale to a client outside of your company / organization you are required to repurchase the product the appropriate number of times or purchase an enterprise license.

Enterprise License (US$ 300)

The Enterprise Licence grants you and any number of employees of your company / organization, a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to make use of and display the product that you have acquired to either your own personal use, for projects within the your company or for projects with the intent of resale to external customers without limitations.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):

Question: Are we able to change the text in the component ourselves?
Answer: Yes the stop message is fully customizable through the Widget parameters.

Question: When I insert the component in Adobe Captivate all I get is a blank box. Is that normal?
Answer: Yes that is perfectly normal. In Edit view in Adobe Captivate all you get is a blank box. However, once you publish your project it will work just fine.

Question: Can I use this component in a course delivered through an LMS?
Answer: Yes that is no problem at all.

Question: Can I use this component in a course delivered through our corporate intranet?
Answer: Yes as long as you have a domain name then it will be fine.

Question: I also bought the Bookmark component and want to use both of them in the same project. Is that possible?
Answer: Yes that is possible. Place the DomainLock widget on the timeline first and then the Bookmark Widget afterwards.

Question: I really would like to have this for Adobe Captivate 3. Is that possible?
Answer: This version uses AS3, which isn’t possible to use in Adobe Captivate 4. However, I can compile a special AS 2 version for Adobe Captivate 3 for you. This component would have the domain and the stop message hard coded so you would not be able to change it yourself. Send me an email with the details and I will make the component for you. Price is US$ 25.

Question: What happens if the project has a playbar?
Answer: The DomainLock Widget will disable the playbar while the domain check is in progress. If the domain is authorized the playbar will be enabled again.

Question: Can I use this widget in a project that has the TOC (Table of Contents) enabled?
Answer: Yes that is possible. Set the widget to display for rest of project then.

Change of domain name

I have changed the domain name of my blog from www.captivate4.com to www.cpguru.com.

Unknowingly I had been in violation of Adobe’s trademark policy since Captivate is a registered trademark. I have been in contact with Adobe about this and decided to move my blog to a different domain, which didn’t violated any policies.

In all fairness I just want to add that Adobe have been excellent in the discussion about the old domain name. They also offered that I could keep using www.captivate4.com but I felt it would be better to get a new unique domain name instead.

I have redirected all traffic from the old domain to this domain so if you have www.captivate4.com bookmarked then please updated your bookmark.

There are still a few things missing on this site, but it should be fully functional with the exception of the Domain Lock widget demonstration. The demo files are still locked to www.captivate4.com but I will update that asap.

/Michael

User registrations disabled for now

I found an possible exploit in the WordPress system, which allows a registered user to gain access to some privileges that they definitely shouldn’t have.

Due to this new user registrations are currently disabled on this site. I have sent the details to the WordPress developer team so they can fix the issue.

/Michael

Using advanced actions for slidelet navigation

 I recieved an email from Shaun Barrow about a little trick he had for Rollover Slidelets. I told him that if he wrote up a small tutorial I would post it here on the site.

Below is what Shaun sent me – all credits go to him. 

­I was working on a project that required me to make a rollover slidelet that when clicked would go back to the current slide.  This in itself is not possible with the current design of Captivate 4, you are unable to link to the slide the rollover slidelet is on. 

 This was an issue for me.

I then remembered I had played around with advanced actions.  The ability to create an advanced action that will Jump to a slide.  YES!  This will work because it seems Actions are independent of the actual slide itself!

 Now with this saved I can go back to the properties of the slidelet:

Yes, I agree it’s a hack-around but it works and saved me a lot of frustration with what I needed to do.

Hope you enjoy.

Shaun B

Shaun.barrow@gmail.com

Spam – does it really work?

Since I launched this site back in November 2008 I have been receiving an ever increasing amount of spam comments. It’s not really a problem because I use a great WordPress plug-in called “Akismet”, which does a great job of sorting spam from ham.

I get around 80-140 spam comments every day and I just delete them. In the beginning I went through the comments to see if there were any false positives, but I don’t do that any more. So if you write a comment and it doesn’t show up then it was probably identified as spam and deleted – sorry about that ;o)

Every time I delete the spam comments I glance at the various topics. I am amazed by the amount of crap that gets written and I really wonder if someone actually click and purchase items based on these posts. I mean it must be worthwhile for the spammers or otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

The majority of the spam comments are about medical and pharmaceutical products and then of course of sex (in any imaginable and in-imaginable form). A lot of the spam comments are also about Search Engine Optimization and SEO services.  The interesting things about these SEO services is that if you look at their websites they are seemingly respectable companies,but still they resort to spamming. I would never use a company like that since the spamming part tells me a lot about their business moral and business conduct.

This one is one of the latest spam comments:

 Submitted on 2009/08/28 at 9:44am

I Don?t Usually Reply to Posts But I Will in this Case. Of Course, What a Great Site and Informative Post, I Always Wanted to Write in My Site Something Like That. Thank You!

P.S: Please Take a Minute to Visit My Stock Market Website as Well: (URL removed)

Would you like to place your money or pension fund into the hands of a company that writes like a 5 year old kid? I would not…

Then again – the increasing amount of spam is an indication that my blog is becomming more and more popular. That’s a nice thing so bring on the spam spammers !