We get a lot of questions about what ScreenSteps Live is. Here are some examples:

“Is it .Mac for ScreenSteps Lessons?”

No.

“Is it just a file sharing service?”

No.

“Is it a blog for ScreenSteps Lessons?”

No. But we did say that once which was a bad marketing move on our part - completely the wrong category to put ScreenSteps Live in.

And our favorite:

“Why would I need ScreenSteps Live when I can already export lessons as HTML or post them to my blog?”

The answer to that takes just under 5 minutes and can be seen in the video below.

The ScreenSteps Live API uses REST to retrieve manuals from your ScreenSteps Live account via xml.

Urls

The request urls are pretty simple. Currently the following requests are supported:

/api/manuals	Retrieve a list of all public manuals for an account
/api/manuals/:manual_id	Retrieves the table of contents for a single manual. The manual id can be the id number for a manual or the permalink that you set up on ScreenSteps Live.
/api/manuals/:manual_id/lessons/:lesson_id	Retrieves the content of a lesson in a manual. Also retrieves basic information about the manual (title, and id) as well as the title and id of the next and previous lessons in a manual.

By default only public manuals will be retrieved. If you wish to retrieve a manual that is protected then you can add the “?show_protected=true” parameter to the end of the url.

Required Headers

The following headers are required when making a request:

Date	The current time and date in http format (e.g. Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:24:47 GMT).
Content-Type	Should be set to “application/xml”
Authorization	This is the authorization string that you will need to compute for each request (explained below)

Authorization String

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We are very excited to announce the beta of the ScreenSteps Live API beta. What does this mean? Now you can upload and manage all your lessons at ScreenSteps Live but embed the content into your own website, web app or desktop application. To help you see the potential we have created a couple of screencasts, one demonstrating the API with some PHP example code and another demonstrating a Rails plugin we have developed that makes integrating ScreenSteps Live content into your Rails app almost effortless.

You can get the PHP code example and Rails plugin at our GitHub site:

• PHP example code
• ScreenSteps Help Rails Plugin

Currently the API is in beta. We have setup an example account for you to play around with if you like. The details for this are in the screencasts. If you have a ScreenSteps Live and would like to have the API enabled for you please drop us an email at info at screensteps dot com and we will get you setup.

Here are the two screencasts:

PHP Example Code

Full Size Video

Ruby on Rails ScreenSteps Help Plugin

Full Size Video

Last night we pushed some changes to ScreenSteps Live to make it easier to respond to user comments on your lessons. We have also made it much easier to manage Reader permissions on ScreenSteps Live.

Respond to Comments

A lot of the comments we get on lessons are actually questions about our product. We found a couple of things:

1. Sometimes we wanted to just respond to a comment with an email to the person. We have now made that much easier to do.
2. Oftentimes the answer to the user’s question was in a lesson somewhere else in the same manual. We have now made it really easy to insert a link to another lesson in the same manual into your response.

You can check out this lesson to see how it all works:

• Responding to Comments

Readers and Groups

We have greatly simplified the process of managing permissions for readers. You can now see all of reader’s activity, what manuals they have access to and what groups they belong to from one screen. We also improved the Groups list. Check out the following lessons to see the changes. We hope you find the updates useful.

• Setting Reader Permissions and Viewing Reader Activity
• The Groups List

Over the weekend we posted some updates to ScreenSteps Live. This is the start to a slightly different direction for ScreenSteps Live so we wanted to let you know what we have been doing and where we are going.

When ScreenSteps Live was originally launched it was really just a place to post ScreenSteps lessons. It was somewhat like a blog for ScreenSteps lessons.

The problem we found for our customers, and for ourselves, was that we didn’t want to have yet “another” blog for tutorials. So we really didn’t end up using ScreenSteps Live that way. ScreenSteps Live for us, and for many of our customers, became a place to support users by creating online manuals. But not a place to just occasionally post lessons.

We could see this in our customer usage. Our customers that were using ScreenSteps Live as a customer support tool were posting a lot of lessons and posting very regularly. Those who were just using it as a kind of blog only posted occasionally.

With this realization we have made a few changes to ScreenSteps Live. I don’t want to say that we are relaunching ScreenSteps Live but we are definitely heading in a slightly different direction.

Quick List of Changes

Here is a quick list of the changes launched this weekend:

1. No more front page lessons - There are no longer lessons available at the main screenstepslive.com site. If users want to see your lessons then they must specifically go to your account. For example, ours is bmls.screenstepslive.com.
2. Embed full manuals into your website - You can now embed the table of contents for a complete manual into your own website or web app. Just copy some javascript code and insert it into your web page. The table of contents will appear on your own web page and will update each time you change your manual on ScreenSteps Live. This gives you the benefit of the ease of use of ScreenSteps Live while still having the manual table of contents appear on your site. Once the user clicks on a link in your manual they will be taken to the lesson on ScreenSteps Live. Here is a lesson on how to do it: Embedding Manuals.
3. Updated Plans - The available plans have changed slightly. The main change has come to the free plan. Before the free plan was just a place to post ScreenSteps Live lessons. If that is all you want to do then we really suggest that you use ScreenSteps 2.1 with a blog service such as WordPress or TypePad. The new free plan is really a chance for you to try out the features available on ScreenSteps Live for customer support.

If you already have a free plan nothing will change for you. You still have the same plan that you had before. The updated free plans only affect new users of ScreenSteps Live.

A More Detailed Look At The Changes and Where ScreenSteps Live is Going

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We just launched an update to ScreenSteps Live that allows you to easily add contextual help to your web application using ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live. What do we mean by that? Well, now you can get a little javascript from ScreenSteps Live that points to lessons with a specific tag in your online manual. So, for example if you had a screen on in your web app called “Administration”, you could tag all of the lessons that applied to that screen with “Administration Screen”. Then copy the javascript from ScreenSteps Live, insert it into your Administration screen on your web app and you have instant contextual help. What is cool is that if you ever post a new lesson with the “Administration Screen” tag it will automatically show up in the contextual help.

Check out the video below to see how this works.

Just wanted to let you know that we deployed the updates to ScreenSteps Live this morning. This includes the change from “topics” to “manuals” mentioned in the previous post as well as:

• New index page for Manuals
• The ability to add text along the side of each manual page where you can link to other downloads, websites, etc.
• A new template called “Live”. Check out our ScreenSteps live site (bmls.screenstepslive.com) to see it. I think you’ll like it.
• The ability to respond to comments on a lesson right inside the “Edit Lesson” view.
• Lots of additional bug fixes.

We will be updating the ScreenSteps Live documents on Monday, but if you get a chance, tell us what you think of the new layout.

 

We wanted to notify all of our users of a few changes that are coming to ScreenSteps Live. These changes will primarily affect paid account holders.

This weekend we will be changing the name of “Topics” to “Manuals”. Some of our users were confused about what Topics really were and how they should organize their content. We think that a simple rename will make this much clearer. Don’t worry if you have sent urls out that look like http://bmls.screenstepslive.com/topics/1. Those will redirect tohttp://bmls.screenstepslive.com/manuals/1 after the update so none of your links will be broken.

In addition, we are changing the look a little bit for the new “Manuals”. You can now add a message to the left of each manual where you can include links to your mains site or other relevant information. We plan to add some additional options to this “Manuals Sidebar” in the near future, so stay tuned.

We have also added two new options, “Require Login for All Users” and “Permalinks for Manuals”.

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