For those who aren't aware, my work consists of making improvements to a web based application. A large number of users work with the application, and despite our best efforts at perfect, "no training required" usability some people still need a little help.
We outsource our help files to a guy who doesn't actually receive any training from us. We give him a login to the application, he clicks around checking what changes we've made, and he updates the help files. I swear, the guy is a genius. I can't imagine writing help files for the stuff that
I built.
Anyway, he's been doing his work in Microsoft Word, and saving it as an html file. He then sends us all the help files before a release to be put in "as is" into the application. Word being what it is, it saves the files and and formatting with a bunch of other garbage. Some of that can actually be dangerous. We found out the other that some of the embedded HTML in the help file linked to an external site. It wasn't harmful, but it could have been.
We realized we needed to get him a no frills, free HTML editor. Something simple like notepad wouldn't work because he didn't know how to write HTML (and it'd be a pain to do the formatting even if he did).
Browsing around, I realized that a blog editor works perfectly. It has everything you could possibly want- fonts, bolding and italics, size changes... All you need to do is make a dummy account.
Ironically, we also realized that we had a built in HTML editor in our application and that's what he ended up using, but I thought this was a good idea if anybody is stuck in an electronic desert and is wracking their brains for an HTML editor on the fly.
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