You can find your profile by accessing the Dashboard that is displayed at the top of your screen after you login. Your Profile page can be found under the Users section of the Dashboard.

Among other reasons, the Your Profile page is where you want to be if you’d like to change you password, for example. Note that your Username cannot be changed. You can, however, use the other fields to enter your real name, which I recommended. I don’t know why, but the theme we use requires a nickname. I just entered my username, but you can put whatever you like. Also, this is where you can change which name to display along with your posts.

Many members have a “once and done” approach to their profiles, but if you’ve not visited Your Profile page in a while, maybe it’s time to give it a look, especially if you are an officer or active member in the Society. Displaying our avatars and accolades shows others we’re active members and encourages them to get involved with our community too.

On our site, whenever you write a post, the attribution section displays three pieces of information. The first two bits come from Your Profile page:

1. Your name, as you selected it under the drop-down menu titled “Display name publicly as”
2. Whatever you typed into the “Biographical Info” section

You can enter any text in the “Biographical Info” section, but I recommended you toot your horn. Maybe you’d like to share a brief greeting or salutation. Anything is better than nothing. Remember to click the Update Profile button at the bottom of the page when you are finished writing your bio.

The third piece of information displayed is your avatar. The avatar is a thumbnail image you associate with your profile. It can be anything. It doesn’t have to be your picture.

For our site, we use a popular, free and secure service called Gravatar.com. It’s easy to use, and works automatically. Use the email address you used when you registered here, up-load your images, and Gravatar does the rest. We use 80×80 pixel thumbnails, but Gravatar will automatically resize for you, if needed. It’s fun, try it out!

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s new avatar and bio. If you get stuck, post your issue here and I’ll help if I can.

I recently discovered the Document Map feature in Microsoft Word, and it makes it super easy to jump around a long document. For example, when I’m reading a use case and need to jump from alternate flows back to the basic flow, I often lose my place while scrolling through the many pages.

The Document Map is like having a table of contents displayed at all times. As you click a heading, the document jumps to that page.

To display the Document Map, check the option on the View tab:

There is no method within Author-it for tracking down these duplicate file names (the HTML file name field is not searchable).

However, if you’re using SQL server, you can create an Excel spreadsheet that can help track down duplicates when the dreaded blank topic files appear.

These instructions are for Excel 2003. I’m sure it can be done for other versions, but I haven’t done it.

1. Open Excel.
2. From the menu bar, select Data > Import External Data > New Database Query. The Choose Data Source dialog appears.
   1. On the databases tab, select sqlserver, and then click OK. The SQL Server Login dialog appears.
   2. In Server, enter or select the SQL Server that is used by Author-it. This should take the form of <host name>\<database name> or <IP address>\<database name>. For example, 192.168.3.35\authorit.
   3. Select the appropriate authentication method for your database. If you are uncertain, select Use Trusted Connection first. If that fails and you do not know the database Login ID and password, contact your SQL administrator.
3. Click Next. The Choose Columns page of the Query Wizard appears.
4. Under Available tables and columns, expand TOPIC_OBJT.
5. Select the OBJT_ID, HEADING, H_CONTEXT_ID, and HT_FILENAME columns and add them to your query by clicking the > button. After each column has been added, click Next. The Filter Data page of the Query Wizard appears.
6. Click Next. The Sort Order page of the Query Wizard appears.
7. Click Next. The Finish page of the Query Wizard appears.
8. Select Return Data to Microsoft Office Excel, and then click Finish. The Import Data dialog appears.
9. Select where you want to put the imported data, and then click OK. The data is imported and inserted into Excel.
10. From the menu bar, select Data > Filter > AutoFilter. A sorter is added to the top of each column in the spreadsheet.

To find all topics using a duplicate file name, click the down arrow in the HT_FILENAME column header and select the name of the file that is publishing as a blank page. The list updates to show ever topic that has that same file name.

Once you create this spreadsheet, you can save it and reuse it every time you encounter a blank topic from duplicated file names. Data should update automatically, but I usually select Data > Refresh Data just to be sure.

This is completely safe. You can import the data into Excel from SQL, but you cannot use this method to modify the data in SQL. It’s one-way, so very useful and safe for reporting.