It’s time to learn a bit more about Adobe Captivates newest features.

I hadn’t played with branching, so first I  Googled, and found the really cool example of branching with the Captivate image slideshow, which I hadn’t used either. The demo is available at http://blogs.adobe.com/educationleaders/2010/03/adobe_captivate_-_branching_sl.html

For my example, I played with a screen demo of a friend’s site,  TheMusicBook, an online music directory for musicians in Australia.

For the branching, I  decided to create a basic menu for some of the search options at The Music Book.

As the objective was to host the video at YouTube, although I could have used a 16:9 ratio (the latest ratio at YouTube), I just used the standard 4:3 ratio, for this narrow site. I recorded at 1024×768.

Things never go smoothly when recording demonstrations. Despite taking notes earlier in the day, I forgot to adjust the Captivate defaults before recording, so I had to go back afterwards and turn of mouse clicks, mouse display, and default durations.

Then on the last screen, I clicked outside the recording window, and Firefox crashed. Firefox tends to crash about once a week for me,  so that’s not unusual.

I added the extra screen for the menu buttons, created the branching by editing the buttons so that they would “go to”  the correct place in the demo, and return to the menu when the branch was complete.

Saved and published it as a SWF as usual. Tested it in the browser,   and the branching was nice, interactive, and working.

But the problem with YouTube is that it won’t accept SWF files for uploading. Even though Captivate can publish as AVI, my past experiments found the filesize was waaay too large.

So as per one of the suggestions from an old Adobe blog, I purchased SoThink’s SWF to AVI conversion program.

My first attempt at conversion lasted 2 seconds – there’s a default option in SoThink, that automatically finishes recording after the last slide, and for some odd reason with Captivate SWF files, it always thinks the first slide is the last slide.  So I turned off the setting and tried again.

This time it sat and did nothing after the first slide. I’m assuming this is because the interactive menu started on the second slide. So I ended up pretending to be an interactive visitor, and selected each of the menu options whilst playing and recording my Captivate demonstration, in SoThink. I’m not sure if this means that you can’t have an interactive video in YouTube, or to convert an interactive SWF into AVI. Whatever.

So now I had an AVI format movie. Time to upload it to YouTube.

I logged in, and started uploading. YouTube lets you edit the title and description while the upload is progressing in the background.  Strangely, as soon as I typed the word Captivate into the description tag, the upload ended with an error. No details, just an error.

Was it a format problem?   What the heck, let’s try it again.  I didn’t use the word Captivate in the description, and this time it uploaded successfully.

It’s not a great example – it’s just an adventure. And here it is:

I finished converting my womens health and fitness site to Drupal, tonight.

On Sunday, on impulse, I thought I’d test myself and see how quickly I could do it. I imagined finding a free template,  installing Drupal, copying the content, doing the redirects, and being finished within a few hours.

It never works like that.

The free template search led me to the Genesis templates, which are actually just a structured basis for template design. So I ended up spending an hour mocking up a layout, then another hour or so  doing the CSS styling.

I had to download fresh versions of the Drupal core, and the ten modules that I like to use.

Then installed them all, which was the quick part, and updated the nameservers, as  I was moving host.

Normally Godaddy does the dns delegation really quickly, but even though I checked the Godaddy settings (yes, they’d accepted my DNS), nothing happened for around 4 hours, until I re-entered the same details. This time it worked. (And to think I was blaming IINET under my breath. Shock horror.).

So it wasn’t until Monday night after work, that the DNS was finally updated, and I could run the install.

Spent most of Monday night (after dinner) starting to copy pages across.

Rather than waste traffic, I was planning to redirect the old page URLs to the new addresses, with 301 redirects. But the standard htaccess redirect commands didn’t work.

Courtesy of Google, I found a suggestion to use rewriterule  instead of redirect (http://www.bestjudo.com/blog/26337/khadaji/moving-website-drupal-301-redirects-and-404-pages), but that didn’t work for me.

So I ended up using another module for Drupal, http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect, to manually redirect each old page to the new one. I could have setup a rule to match old and new names, but I wanted some variations in my page titles, and there weren’t really a lot of pages.  An excellent post by Dave Herron addresses the rewrite rule with Drupal: http://davidherron.com/content/cure-fail-when-using-redirectmatch-clean-urls-drupal

So tonight I finished copying all the page content across.

Finished the redirects.

Finished the meta data.

Added Google Analytics to this site (for the first time), and it’s recording data, so the redirects are working well. According to AWSTATS on my old host I used to get around 40-50 visitors per day – not too bad for a 4yo site I hadn’t touched for a couple of years.

And I’ve added forums, polls and my own blog,  as another way of sharing any health and fitness findings I bump into.

Sunday through Tuesday night, after hours, after dinner.

And I still managed to swim 500m today – without the spa!