Today (November 26) is Blue Beanie Day, the day that thousands of Standardistas (people who support Web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show support for accessible, semantic Web content.

This is an online event, taking place at Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and so on. Standardistas upload photos of themselves wearing a Blue Beanie (to match Jeffrey Zeldman's picture on the cover of his book, Designing with Web Standards) to the social networks they belong to.

I've changed my photos at Facebook and Flickr...now I just have to remember to change them back at some point! (And yes, my beanie is black, not blue, but that was all I could find!)

So don your Blue Beanie, snap a picture, and let the world know that you support Web standards! (Or skip the picture part, but still let the world know!)

Adobe is offering a variety of "on demand" and live seminars for TCS and the individual products (RoboHelp 7, FrameMaker 8, Captivate 3, and Acrobat 3D). These seminars cover a variety of concepts, from ROI to content reuse to specific tool functionality.

OnDemand Sessions use Adobe Acrobat Connect, and require that you register with Adobe first. Note that it isn't possible to leave questions, as the seminars are actually recordings.

Two of the OnDemand Seminars are:

• Real time ROI for Online Help (an in-depth look at RoboHelp 7), a presentation by RJ Jacquez. This presentation covers the new features in RoboHelp 7, and includes a demonstration of new localization features, the new interface (with side-by-side topic display), variables, and FrameMake integration. The presentation takes just over an hour.
• Benefits of Content Reuse, a presentation by RJ Jacquez. This presentation covers integration between the RoboHelp 7 and FrameMaker 8 versions that ship with TCS, and includes a demonstration of how the integration works. RJ also demonstrates Captivate integration with Frame. (I've seen one of RJ's live presentations at a conference that includes much of this information, and he does a nice job of showing how the two products work together.) The presentation takes just over an hour.

Visit the OnDemand Seminars page for the complete list of seminars.

When Author-it Software Corporation (ASC) released Author-it 5.0 at the end of September, it also released Author-it Xtend, patent-pending technology that is a first in the Help authoring world.

Author-it Xtend lets you make conscious, intelligent re-use decisions based on your existing content. You get to choose how often or how quickly you want to be notified of matching content, with settings including:

• Minimum number of words typed before suggesting: Choose the number of words that AIT users must type before Xtend prompts with suggestions.
• Maximum number of suggestions: Choose the total number of suggestions that you want to see.
• Percentage matching: Choose what the match percentage must be before suggestions are displayed.

What's really cool is the customizable highlighting feature of Xtend. When your library has been analyzed, you can enable highlighting and immediately tell how a paragraph has been used before: 100% (exact match), or any range you specify.

Read more!