This minor NarraFirma release adds one bit of functionality and makes a few visual tweaks.
An off-line NarraFirma journal
NarraFirma began its life as a write-it-yourself notebook. When I finished the third edition of Working with Stories in 2014, I wanted to write something that would help people think through their PNI projects by answering questions in an interview-style notebook. At first I thought this would be a printed book with lots of white space, but the idea grew (and grew) into NarraFirma.
All of these years later, I realized one day that people who don’t want to install NarraFirma might still want to use a project notebook. So I made one.
I didn’t want to add a button to the NarraFirma interface that stands outside of a NarraFirma project, because then I’d have to add two buttons, one for WordPress and one for Node.js. So to get an empty NarraFirma journal, you have to install NarraFirma, then create a project. After that, you can go to the Project administration link on the NarraFirma home page, click Print, and click Print empty project journal.
When you do this, NarraFirma will generate an HTML file with every journaling-type question it asks, plus some prompts to write in the things you would normally enter into NarraFirma, like the questions you asked and the stories you collected. You can save this HTML file, open it in a word processor, and write into it, adding lines as you need them. If you want a printed copy to write in by hand, you can save the HTML file, add some empty lines after each question, and print the file.
Of course, people who don’t want to install NarraFirma won’t be able to do this! So I have placed a stand-alone empty journal file on the NarraFirma web site. If I make any major changes to the NF questions in the future, I’ll try to remember to update this file.
An empty journal file does not contain any information from the NarraFirma project you have open when you generate it. It only has the questions NarraFirma asks, not any answers you may have entered. If you want to print the answers you have entered, use the “Print project report” button (on the same Project admin page) instead.
I’m thinking that NF users might like to use this functionality in three circumstances:
- to help them carry out a pilot project that seems too small to create a NF project for (but is still worth thinking through)
- to give members of their team or oversight group who don’t want to use NarraFirma a way to participate in the project (e.g., to make suggestions and record reflections)
- to use NarraFirma without using NarraFirma – that is, without installing any complicated software
A few more tiny changes
I also made two tiny tweaks to the way things look in NarraFirma. I increased the “line height” parameter in the CSS (so multi-line prompts look less squashed together), and I reduced the size of the home-page diagram just a bit. That’s all.
Any ideas for small improvements?
I don’t have enough spare time to make large investments in NarraFirma development, but I do try to find little things like this I can add to it every six months or so. If you have an idea for a small thing I could add to (or fix in) NarraFirma, send me an email (cfkurtz at cfkurtz dot com) and I’ll see if I can get it into my next to-do list.
As always, if you find any bugs – or find anything in NF confusing or hard to use – please tell me on the GitHub issues page.