Since I posted my article last month on How To Create Your Own Personal Document Viewer, I’ve had a few inquiries on how people could have a similar setup themselves.  I thought it might be helpful to .zip up the docbrowser project and show some of the code that does the conversions using the utilities I illustrated in the article.  Disclaimer: This code is by no means my finest work (it was hacked together on a Sat. afternoon), but it gets the job done.  At a high-level the code is …

Overview
Like most people, I have a large number of personal documents in a variety of formats (PDF, Excel, Word, RTF, PowerPoint, etc.). For the typical user, organizing these documents in a ‘My Documents’ folder and having MS Office/Open Office/Adobe Acrobat installed simply gets the job done. However, I’ve been looking for some sort of “Web 2.0″ solution to view my documents while I’m on the go. And, since my knowledge manager is web-based, I’d like a way to browse and embed personal documents directly in my wiki …

After some mildly confusing debugging, I finally discovered why my MindMap Viewer was not working with some configurations of Firefox 3, Flash, and Linux or Mac.  I first noticed this myself on Linux a couple weeks ago (Ubuntu / FF3 / Flash 10), and assumed this had something to do with my recent upgrade to Firefox version 3.   Then today, a viewer commented on a recent post that they were seeing the following error on a Mac:
“Flash plugin or Javascript are turned off. Activate both and reload to view the …