askSam Web Publisher

Contributed by Janie Sapp

Reprinted with Permission

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     In the course of becoming and working as a Web Developer for GulfNet Technologies, I had encountered a wide variety of formats and file sizes that I had converted into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Lake City Community College then approached GulfNet with a new project, their student catalog, with the Table of Contents being hypertext linked to other parts of the catalog. The catalog was created in a popular word-processing program and given to me on diskette. It needed to be converted into HTML, and added to their Web site as soon as possible. The only problem was that this catalog was over 140 pages long!

      After my initial moment of panic, I decided to plunge into the catalog and carefully convert each page to HTML. My average pace is usually one HTML page per hour.  I started working on the catalog, line by line, code by code. Several days went by and I had only finished about 40 pages. It was going to take several more weeks to finish the remaining pages, so I started looking for another solution. I knew my friends at askSam Systems (http://www.asksam.com) had a lot of experience in managing large amounts of information and organizing it, so I went to them for some advice. After I described the project, they told me about their new product, the askSam Web Publisher.

     I thought Web Publisher sounded like the answer to my prayers, so I asked them to give me a demonstration. They took the project disk, imported it into an askSam file and, using Web Publisher, I was able to pull my monster project up on the Web in 10 minutes!! Unlike other HTML conversion utilities, Web Publisher did not change the original document in my askSam file. It converted each document of the catalog into HTML "on the fly" so to speak, as I clicked on the hypertext link and requested the file. My original file could still easily be searched, accessed, and changed in askSam, without worrying about changing HTML coding.  I was amazed at  how simple it was in askSam to set the hypertext links in the Table of Contents (within my file and to external URL's and other parts of the college site). Even better was the fact that the entire Lake City Community College on-line catalog was now searchable! The ability to search through the catalog makes it much more useful to students.

     It is very exciting to have such time-saving products as askSam and the askSam Web Publisher  available to developers like me. These tools provide a new way to quickly organize large amounts of information and make it available on the Web for immediate searching and modification without HTML coding.  I plan to use askSam and the askSam Web Publisher for all of my Web projects in the future.