iPOP Mini START-button - Documentation
1. Inserting the applet in your HTML page.
When putting applets into web pages, it's best to use a
direct HTML code editor that allows you to view and edit
the HTML directly. Frontpage is not a good idea. A Windows
notepad is better than Frontpage.
Start off by copying and pasting the following into
your HTML. Place this at the point where you wish to
have your "launch" button. Note that the launch button
must be visible on a page if the applet is to show, so
it's best to keep the launch button in a frame (topbar or
sidebar).
<applet code="ipfree.class" width=95 height=24>
<param name=copyright value="Image Intelligence Ltd. 1998 (www.imint.com)">
<param name=colourscheme value=7>
</applet >
Keep the height and width the same as above - they determine the
height and width of the "launch" button and it won't look
so good if you change the size. The copyright information
must also be entered - otherwise the applet won't work.
While there are quite a lot of parameters you can add to
configure the appearance of the menu, if you are a beginner,
just try out the colourscheme parameter shown above.
It takes values from 0 to 8, but just experiment with 0 to 7
for the moment and leave 8 until later.
2. Writing your own menu
The menu content is kept in a separate text file called
"menu.txt". This file must be in the same directory as
the applet files. The format of the file is a standard
format used by almost all our applets. We wrote a special
tool for automatically creating and editing such files -
it is the "website indexing system" belonging to
iSlide Pro Studio, and can be downloaded free of
charge from our website. If you like, however, you can also
just write the file with a text editor. You can take a look
at an existing menu file here, or use
the following description.
The index file consists of one line for each entry
in the menu. Empty lines are ignored; comments can be
inserted after // (double slash) which the applet ignores.
A valid line must have the following format:
"TEXT:My Text" "1" "" "LINK:myfile.htm,myFrame" "[Message]"
This would be the equivalent of the HTML:
<A HREF="myfile.htm" TARGET="myFrame">My Text</A>
In other words, it displays the text "My Text", hyperlinks it
to "myfile.htm", and loads the page into a frame called
"myFrame" when clicked. In addition, a message to appear in the
browser status bar can be entered between the final set of
inverted commas. If you want to know more about what kind of
links can be entered, this page
contains a lot of information.
Following "TEXT:My Text"
in the example above, there are two further entries reading
"1" "".
The first of these is the hierarchy marker. With the iPOP Mini START-button,
only the values 1 and 2 are valid. Entries with value 1 go in the topmost
menu box. Entries with value 2 go in a sub-menu box. Creating a sub-menu
box is easy - you just put all the sub-menu contents after the parent
entry line in the index file, and make sure they all have value 2 as the
hierarchy marker. Following the hierarchy marker are a couple of "". In
this applet these markers have no function, but they MUST be entered or
the applet will not work. They are there because these index files must be
compatible with all our other menu applets.
When writing an index manually, the most frequent mistake is
to put the wrong number of ". Count them, or use the editing tool
mentioned above.
And finally: remember that this applet won't take more than
about 100 items in the index. If you want a menu that does
big sites, you'll need iPOP Express or iPOP Pro.
3. Uploading it all to your website
You must upload three things to the same directory:
ipfree.class (upload in binary mode)
ibfree.class (upload in binary mode)
menu.txt (upload in ascii mode)
In addition, you should put the HTML file that uses
the applet into the same directory as these files. A frequent
mistake is to put things in the wrong place or give them
incorrect names - then the files can't find each other.
When trying out stuff on your website or locally, you should
realise that changes while developing will not always appear if you just
reload the page. You must super-reload (SHIFT-reload under
Netscape and CTRL-reload under Microsoft).
4. Changing the applet's appearance
Now that you've done all the above and seen how it works,
you can try out some of the optional stuff. You can change a lot
of the colours, reformat the text, and insert separators.
To insert a separator, write
"separator:" "1" "" "" ""
as a line in the index file. If the separator is inside a sub-menu,
you should write "2" instead of "1".
To format the text (for the moment excluding colours), there
are the following parameters. The parameters must be written
into your HTML file between the APPLET tags - just like the
example above.
<param name=textfont value="Helvetica">
<param name=textsize value=11>
<param name=textstyle value=0>
The parameter textfont may have the values
"Helvetica" and "TimesRoman". The parameter textsize
may have any value you choose. The parameter textstyle
follows this scheme: 0 = plain, 1 = bold, 2 = italic, 3 = bold italic.
The colouring options are extensive. First let's look at fast
automatic colouring options. The applet has 7 internal colour
schemes, and you can choose any one of these, or choose an option
that selects from 6 of these schemes randomly each time someone
visits your pages.
<param name=colourscheme value=7>
The value 7 is the random scheme. The values 0 to 6 choose
from the presets - experiment to see what there is. If you
set the value to 8, you can set all the colours yourself,
which requires patience and taste. There are a total of
8 different colours that can be set individually. They all
take hexadecimal values just like HTML colours.
<param name=bgcol1 value="000000">
<param name=bgcol2 value="ece4ba">
<param name=bgcol3 value="6b6331">
<param name=bgcol4 value="9a7932">
<param name=bgcol5 value="9a7932">
<param name=textcol1 value="ba9952">
<param name=textcol2 value="ece4ba">
<param name=textcol3 value="6b6331">
The colour effects are as follows:
bgcol1 = box top-left outer border
bgcol2 = box top-left inner border
bgcol3 = box main fill
bgcol4 = box bottom-right inner border
bgcol5 = box bottom-right outer border
textcol1 = normal text colour
textcol2 = text colour on mouse-over
textcol3 = rectangular background behind text on mouse-over
5. Additional Functions
The iPOP Mini START-button is the first free applet
where we have implemented the advanced safety management
features previously only used in the up-market menus.
Using the escapepage parameter you can ensure
that if anything goes wrong with your site-visitor's
connection or software affecting applet performance, or
if you leave an incorrectly configured applet on your site,
a non-java menu can be loaded automatically.
<param name=escapepage value="nonjavamenu.htm">
6. Additional Help
Remember that with many thousands of people using our free
software, we cannot both provide individual help and develop
more free software for you. Time has its limits. We offer
a great number of FAQ's on this site, covering things like
frames usage, script usage, bug-finding, etc. Please use the
documentations and FAQ's fully before contacting us for help.
Most help requests we receive are from people who haven't
read the documentation and FAQ's properly.
