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

(more…)

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

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.