Well that thing that Dave asked me to do has been bugging me. So I wrote a lot of it over the weekend.
Basically what this thing is is a web server that sits in your taskbar tray and serves files. There is no security implemented in it yet, so beware if you try it.
To start up the application, unzip all of the files into a directory and run the EnclaveDesktop application. Be sure to retain the directory structure in the zip file. In the future, there will only be three files - I’m going to compress all of the internal images into one file.
Assuming all things are running well, you should then have an icon in your tray and a web server running on port 88. Try going to http://localhost:88 to see if it’s working.
Now that the server is up, you’ll want to serve some files. When I say “files” I don’t mean HTML web pages, I’m talking about file sharing - images and movies and such.
To add files to the server, right-click on the tray icon and choose Add Files. A window appears. Click the button at the top that says Add Virtual Path. An input box will appear, into which you should type “images”, or whatever you wnat the virtual directory to be called.
After the folder appears in the tree view on the left side, click on it. That causes the file browser to display the files in that virtual path. To add new files, just drag them onto the file browser or onto the virtal path that you want to put them in.
If you go back to the web browser and reload the page, you’ll note that the additions you’ve made have been applied already. You should be able to navigate down through the folders and find any files you have added.
The RSS feed support is beginning to work, too. I picked up the Turbo Power XML component at SourceForge, and it is really sweet. Native XML in Delphi with XPath. Seems to work fine in 2005, too. At this point you can only see the RSS for this site, but that’s not bad, eh? I’ll be adding the ability to add (and cache) new RSS feeds to the context menu of the tray icon.
There are other features that I’m adding that I don’t want to publicize too much yet, since I might never get to them. But I will be adding the DynDns support that I mentioned before, which is essential to the whole project. And there are some collaborative ideas that I have that are really sweet.
Anyway, gotta run now, since it’s suddenly beoome very late.
