But here is the real thing you will not see and it took me going to their help files to find it and I am showing you this because as you use these extensions, sometimes you have to go to trial and error to figure out what each programmer did to make things work. As I save this page, I should logically be able to know, preview it and see my random slide show but here in Firefox, I do not see anything. So, I am going to comeback over, launch this command again because I notice they had a little help button and I am going to go ask for help why do I not I see that.
In Chaosweaver, I have to give them credit, has pretty good help. And they warn you right away although I think this should be built into the program itself that now in version 4.3 of this, this will no longer work in preview mode. You actually have to upload this to a server for your images to display properly. So, I am going ahead and do that. Give you a quick refresher on uploading pages to your server and show you this little trick in action.
Let me just switch back over to Dreamweaver and I am going to use Dreamweaver’s FTP capabilities to upload this. If you are not familiar, it is under the manage site option. Just click edit when you got a site selected and it is the remote server info that you need to set your FTP capabilities. You will get all of the information here from your host provider or from your sys admin depending on how you host your website. And notice you do have to select the FTP from the access option.
So again, this is an advanced training. I am assuming you know this already but just to keep you up to speed with me, click done to close the manage sites window and here are some icons that you might not be familiar with. It is the expenditure, local and remote sites button. This opens up this window so that when I connect to my server, I see all of the files on my server on this side of the screen and the files in my local site over here.
Now, you can switch back and forth in the files panel but I find this a little more intuitive. I click here into my HTML folder, this will depend on how your server setup exactly where you would put this file but I am replacing the index file in this site. You should replace whatever file you have added this random image generator to and put it up on your site. I do not need to put a dependent file from this case because the images are already on the site. So, it should just take a second.
Now, when I go to see this on the server, I can switch over to my browser and type in my server address. This is a special site I setup just for this training. Now, notice here in the left that I am getting a nice little slideshow here and it is not just like an animated gift where they go in sequence. If you will watch this long enough, you will see that they are randomly getting pulled out so that different images appear in different sequence each time.
Now, this is a relatively simple use of this script, butt you can imagine, if you wanted to have a different image appear on your page everyday or you wanted to have a huge selection of images that you drew from randomly. This is a great little trick for just adding a little of the unexpected to the front of your website.
Now, as I mention, this is a server I setup just for this lesson so if you try to go to Janine.nexus.net you are not going to find this website. But I wanted you to see what happens when you use an extension like this that only functions when a page is uploaded to a server. And I wanted to warn you that some of the extensions you might download are going to require uploading to be functional.
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