Just bought a Windows Home Server? Managed to configure Remote Access? Now looking for a simple add-in that will show a link to your favourite web pages on the WHS home page? Then at first glance, Steve Van Horn’s Windows Home Server Website Manager appears to meet your needs.
Following installation in the WHS Console a button labelled Websites is visible in the Console tab - so far so good.
Clicking on the button shows three menu items; Add, Properties and Remove.
Clicking on Add, (as the others are greyed out), brings up a general properties box.
Two radio buttons select between Home Page and Remote Access (which is selected by default) and three entry fields: Name, URL and Image. OK, so I give my favourite web site a name and then cut and paste the web address into the URL field. What’s next? Image, what does this mean? Can I cut and paste an image into here? Nope, there is no browse button to go and select an image, so maybe I can cut and paste the path to an image? I can but the Apply button is still greyed out so that can’t be right. I read the text next to the information icon “URLs and Images can either be relative to the WHS Remote site (prefix with /) or fully qualified URLs (prefix with http://) well I’m still no better off for that.
So seemingly stuck, I exit out and click on the help button on the top right of the WHS Console. Nothing, not even a “there is no help associated with this item” box. If I wasn’t so stubborn (my wife attests to this!) I would probably exit out of the application, uninstall it and go and try another Add-In. But I persist and eventually work out that if I find a graphic that I want to use as an icon for the web link, this is the path to where the graphic is located, either on the home server (WHS Remote site) or a on the web (using a URL).
Creating a Web Link With Windows Home Server Website Manager
I like the off beat cartoon humour that is Fancyteeth and want to put the webpage from the UK’s Channel 4 on the home page of my WHS.
Step 1:First I give the web link a relevant name, “Fancyteeth on Channel 4” seems ideal.
Step 2:After navigating to the Fancyteeth home page (http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/comedy/showcards/F/fancyteeth.html) I cut and paste the URL into the URL field of Website manager.
Step 3:I am going to use the Channel 4 logo from the Fancyteeth web page as my web link icon so I’ll right-mouse click on the image, choosing Properties and then in the General Properties window highlight and copy the Address: (URL) (http://www.channel4.com/media/generic/logos/c4logo.gif) After pasting this into the Image field, and clicking on the Apply button I have created my first web link.
Feeling pretty proud I go to my WHS server home page, what’s this, no link? Maybe that’s what the radio buttons are for. I select the Fancyteeth link in the Websites Console page and then select properties on the tool bar, and select Home Page button and Apply the settings again.
After a refresh of my home server web page the web link appears and takes me straight through to Fancyteeth (go on try watching “Somewhere over Kidderminster” and keep the chuckling down at the back!)
After a bit of searching through the WHS help guide I work out that what Steve calls “Remote Access” means the first page you see once you have logged onto the WHS, in other add-ins this is called a private homepage or within Windows Home Server itself, the Home tab. So switching the radio button to Remote Access places web links on the right side of the WHS Home page visible only after you have logged on.
No Help
The lack of any help facility and confusing language is a big drawback to this Add-In, but by no means is this the only add-in that has little or no help associated with it. Now OK you may say, this is a free add-in what do you expect? Well I expect that if someone has taken the time to write the add-in and then place it in the public arena, all levels of experience and skill should be catered for and a few lines of plain English would make a difference. It would be useful to be able to change the order of the web links as they appear on the page by moving them up and down a list for both the Public and Private web pages. Once I had worked out what was required for adding image icons to web links this became a brilliantly simple add-in to use, but getting there took some perseverance which maybe a newcomer to the world of Windows Home Server and WHS Add-Ins may not have.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:06 am
I’ve seen this add-in around and have to say; I just don’t get it. I can’t think of a reason to put links on the WHS homepage - am I missing something?
Anyway, nice review. Hopefully the author will make the app more intuitive - something sorely needed by a lot of software.
Maybe you should take blur your WHS user name on that last screenshot, though? I guessed your homeserver URL, so now just need to get my army of robot pcs to crack your password. (kidding
January 17th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
I have to agree with andrew, I can’t really see a need. If I needed to share links I use Windows Live Favorites, in fact a better iteration of this (for me) would be to create an iframe to my shared Live Favorites, similar to the Live Spaces gadget.
January 17th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
> Maybe you should take blur your WHS user name on that last screenshot, though?
> I guessed your homeserver URL, so now just need to get my army of robot pcs to crack your password.
Yep, I would.
Noodle’s is quite cute on her 3rd birthday, I have to say…
Peter
January 17th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Thanks for the feedback.
It’s early days in the WHS Add-Ins market place and I guess people will develop add-ins that suit there own needs, and be kind enough to share them. The beauty of add-ins is you can choose/develop what you want for your particular situation..
When I did the screeshot for the WHS remote home page I created a temporary user/login with an extremely long and random name in the WHS console, then allowed access and did the screenshots then removed the user. I had counted on the fact that for some reason the WHS welcome: username doesn’t automatically shift to the left to allow for long usernames.
As for guessing and accessing my homeserver name, well I am sure there are plenty of easy https:\\xxxxxx.homeserver.com names out there to try!! But thanks for your concern.
Andrew
January 21st, 2008 at 3:31 am
I have to diagree with Andrew and Foaf you can create additional webpages with your WHS using IIS (if you understand how to) and can link those pages you created on your hompage I think its a nice feature. for instance I set up Mail on my WHS and have a link to the mail page on my home server. I have also add a link to a page I created that shows new files and albums that have recently been add on my server.
January 21st, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Downloaded - installed and love it - can now access some useful pages right from my MSS home page. Not sure why you were stumped so much by the lack of docs - figured it all out in a few mins - hardest thing was figuring out where to put local logo images as the /webshare part is protected….
January 21st, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Glad you have found the add-in useful. You are right, with a bit of fiddling you can work it out. My point was that users shouldn’t have to mess around to work things out ,the point of the Add-in is to add a feature easily and good documentation sould be part of that.
January 23rd, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Fair point - I guess I figured that the kind of person doing this is gonna be power user or at least semi power user and as such *should* be able to figure thsis stuff out without too many problems. Plus - better a plugin with no docs than no plugin at all! To me it was a no brainer - but guess to my Mom or Dad it would have stumped them. Horses for courses I guess
Thanks for the reply…
January 24th, 2008 at 12:00 am
PS - I put my images for the icons in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\home (if my memory serves me right) and referenced them as /home/image.jpg - all loads fine and I get no security warning that I got if I simply pointed them to a third party site by referencing with http://site/image.jpg. HTH - R
March 2nd, 2008 at 1:55 am
Worked for me.
I have been running HFS on a seperate PC, I now have HFS running on the WHS PC and have used WSM to put a link to HFS on my Home web page. How I wish it was called PUBLIC web page by WSM and NOT Home. Perhaps a dot release will change this?
Don’t know what HFS is? Brilliant Web File Server. go here…
http://www.rejetto.com/hfs/
My Icons are here…
C:\Inetpub\home\icons
regards,
March 27th, 2008 at 8:49 am
I would like to share with you the happy, I was admitted to Harvard University this year, we bless me!
May 4th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
can someone please provide me the correct link? because the provides link is broken.
and i actually lost the MSI installer to:(
May 5th, 2008 at 12:00 am
Hi Dennis, I had a quick look around, as I am sure you did, and couldn’t find any link to this any where. If you PM me via the WGS Forum I am more than happy to send this file to you.
May 8th, 2008 at 2:25 am
A tecnologia utilizada é a 1seg, que é a transmissão de TV para aparelhos portáteis com áudio e vídeo. A taxa de transmissão é de 15 a 30 frames por segundo, dependendo do sinal da emissora. As resoluções de transmissão são 320×240 (4:3) ou 320×180 (16:9), dependendo da emissora. Em tela cheia, a qualidade da imagem deixa muito a desejar. Na prática, dá para assistir TV com uma janela congelada no canto superior direito da área de trabalho, enquanto outros programas são usados.