Website Presenter

Using the command line

If you don’t want to keep typing in the parameters, you can set up a shortcut pointing to Website Presenter and add the parameters to the command line. To enter the command line, right-click on your shortcut and select Properties. In the Target box you will see the path to the program. You can add up to six parameters to the command line as shown:

URL, minDelay, allowNewWindows, workOffline, closeOpenWindows, pass:password

Here are a few examples:

www.surtell.com, 60, allowNewWindows, closeOpenWindows

This will revert back to ‘www.surtell.com’ after 60 seconds. It will also allow visitors to open new browser windows, and it will also close them automatically when the presentation reverts back to the homepage.

If a file is not found locally or in the browser cache, visitors will be prompted to go on-line (for dial-up access; if you are using an always-on connection this will never appear). Visitors may exit Website Presenter by pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL since a password has not been set.

www.yahoo.com, 120, workOffline, pass:mypass

This will revert back to ‘www.yahoo.com’ after two minutes. Visitors will not be able to open new browser windows via links, and they will not be able to go on-line. Visitors may still use features of Internet Explorer such as saving pages and opening new windows with CTRL-N. A way of disabling these features is discussed later on. The only way to exit from the program will be to enter the password ‘mypass’.

Password protection

Entering a password in the dialog box or using the ‘pass’ parameter in the command line enables the password protection facility. The password must be between 1 and 8 characters in length, and is not case sensitive.

Without password protection, visitors may exit Website Presenter by pressing the CTRL-ALT-DEL keys, or cause it to lose focus by pressing the Start key or the ALT-TAB keys.

With password protection enabled, the above key combinations will have no effect. To exit the program, the user must move the mouse to the bottom left of the screen and hold down the left mouse button whilst moving the mouse. A box will then appear allowing the password to be entered.

If you cannot remember the password, or if Internet Explorer crashes, the only way to return to Windows would be to restart your computer.

Static websites

If your website uses only static HTML pages, place all the pages in a folder on the hard drive of the presentation computer and set this folder as your homepage in Website Presenter.

If anything on your website is normally sourced from the Internet (e.g. a hit counter), the browser will ask the visitor to log on to the Internet, which is not desirable. To stop this happening, you can select ‘Never dial a connection’ from ‘Tools > Internet Options > Connections’ in Internet Explorer or set the ‘workOffline’ parameter in Website Presenter.

If you do not have the source files of your website, you can use Internet Explorer’s ‘Make available offline’ feature:

1. Load the homepage of your website.
2. Go to ‘Favorites > Add to Favorites’. Set a title and location for the favorite and click on the ‘OK’ button.
3. Go to ‘Favorites > Organize Favorites’. Find the favorite that you created and click it.
4. Check the ‘Make available offline’ checkbox that appears and then click on the ‘Properties’ button.
5. In the ‘Download’ tab you can tell Internet Explorer how many links deep it should go (maximum three levels), and also whether links outside the website should be followed, which you usually do not want to happen.
6. Click on the ‘OK’ button, then on the other ‘OK’ button.
7. Internet Explorer will download your website to its cache.

Active websites

If your website uses server-side scripting with dynamic content you have three options:

1. Provide the presentation computer with Internet access so that visitors are directly accessing your website. If the connection or server is slow, bear in mind that pages may not appear for some time and that visitors will not see any status messages from Website Presenter.
2. Install server software (such as the Personal Web Server in Windows 98) on the presentation computer and set up your website in the same way as it is on the web server. Pages will load more quickly than if you used the previous option and all of the website’s features, such as search facilities, will probably work in the same way as on your live website.
3. If you are unable to set up server software on the presentation computer, or you do not have the source files of the website you are presenting, you will need to visit each page on the website once so that each is stored in the Internet Explorer cache. For pages that have embedded links, you can use Internet Explorer’s ‘Make available offline’ feature as described previously. However, this is unlikely to download all pages of an active website since pages on such websites can be created on-the-fly in response to visitor input. One example is a search results page; others would be pages that only appear as a result of JavaScript or VBScript scripting.

If you know how your website works, you can create special server-side and/or client-side scripts that can, for example, load all the pages based on records in any databases such that the pages can be viewed offline from the cache.

For example, this page uses a server-side ASP script to compile a list of members who have models in the South East London Meccano Club website’s model gallery, and then uses client-side VBScript to open a browser window for each member:

<html>
 
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-gb">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<title>The SELMEC Website</title>
<script language="vbscript">
 
dim member(100)
 
<%
'SELMEC Members-to-HTML Listing Script
'Version 1
'Written by Tim Surtell and downloaded from www.surtell.com
'(C) July 2001 Tim Surtell
'This code may be freely distributed providing that the credit above is retained.
 
'Setup and open database with query
 
set rsMembers=Server.CreateObject("adodb.Recordset")
connSELMEC = "DSN=SELMEC"
 
sqlSELMEC = "SELECT MEMBER_ID FROM MEMBERS_MODELS"
 
rsMembers.open sqlSELMEC, connSELMEC
 
memberCounter = 0
lastMemberID  = 0
 
if not rsMembers.eof then
  do while not rsMembers.eof
    MEMBER_ID = rsMembers("MEMBER_ID")
    if MEMBER_ID <> lastMemberID then
      lastMemberID = MEMBER_ID
      memberCounter = memberCounter + 1
      response.write "member("&memberCounter&") = "&rsMembers("MEMBER_ID") & vbCrLf
    end if
    rsMembers.moveNext
  loop
end if
 
rsMembers.close
 
response.write vbCrLf & "totalMembers = " &memberCounter & vbCrLf
%>
 
for memberCounter = 1 to totalMembers
  set myWindow = window.open("models.asp?ID="&member(memberCounter))
  do while myWindow.document.readyState <> "complete"
    'Wait until window is fully loaded before moving to next page
  loop
  myWindow.close
next
</script>
</head>

<body link="#FF0000" vlink="#FF0000" alink="#FF0000" bgcolor="#F0FFF0">
 
Opening member windows...
 
</body>
 
</html>

You must also set ‘workOffline’ in the Website Presenter dialog box (or on the command line) so that Internet Explorer will not try to retrieve files from the Internet, but will instead get them from the cache. Note that Website Presenter has no control over pages loaded into new browser windows.