Pointing to a different location for the Live portion.

Archive Weather Display Live Discussion/Questions
1

Something that some people might not realize is that it is possible to have a web page that points elsewhere for the WDLive portion of the content.

I have recently been playing around with my weather web pages and created a web page that is on my primary server, where the WDLive portion is actually hosted on a different server with better bandwidth.

In the section that most people see in the html example:

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0" WIDTH="100%" HEIGHT="100%" id="wdlv3_01.swf" ALIGN>
  <param NAME="movie" VALUE="wdlv3_01.swf?http://www.sample.com/wxlive/wdlconfig.xml">
  <param NAME="quality" VALUE="High">
  <param NAME="wmode" VALUE="Opaque">
  <param NAME="bgcolor" VALUE="B9E9FF">
  <param name="_cx" value="17621">
  <param name="_cy" value="10425">
  <param name="FlashVars" value>
  <param name="Src" value="wdlv3_01.swf?http://www.sample.com/wxlive/wdlconfig.xml">
  <param name="Play" value="0">
  <param name="Loop" value="-1">
  <param name="SAlign" value>
  <param name="Menu" value="0">
  <param name="Base" value>
  <param name="AllowScriptAccess" value="always">
  <param name="Scale" value="ShowAll">
  <param name="DeviceFont" value="0">
  <param name="EmbedMovie" value="0">
  <param name="SWRemote" value>
  <param name="MovieData" value>
  <param name="SeamlessTabbing" value="1">
  <EMBED src="wdlv3_01.swf?http://www.sample.com/wxlive/wdlconfig.xml" quality=high bgcolor=#FFFFFF  WIDTH="100%" HEIGHT="100%" NAME="wdlv3_01.swf" ALIGN=""  TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">  </EMBED></object>

You can source a remote location of where the actual flash file is located with the data.

<param name="Src" value="wdlv3_01.swf?http://www.sample.com/wxlive/wdlconfig.xml">

<param name="Src" value="http://sample.com/wxlive/wdlv3_01.swf?http://www.sample.com/wxlive/wdlconfig.xml">

Same line with a slight difference. The top line assumes the Flash file is local to the page you are loading. It does say exactly where the wdlconf.xml file is, but the wdlv3_01.swf needs to be local.

In the second, line, the data and the flash file are both referenced… so the html file containing this could actually be on a completely different server and path.

A sample of this is my flash page

http://www.tnet.com/weather-live.php

This is on my primary corporate server, but the source and location of the WDLive is actually on another hosted server with a completely different domain. the WDL is registerd in the remote servers domain.

The next step is to do some browser type idenfication and use different settings to get the best looking display depending on if the user is using MSIE or Firefox.

2
The next step is to do some browser type idenfication and use different settings to get the best looking display depending on if the user is using MSIE or Firefox.
i have discovered that the transparent makes FF use more CPU (that is the 2nd transparent command (the one just before the url to the .swf file location)
3

I’ve seen messages about that…

It is quite amazing how what should be a very standard output can look so different between MSIE and FireFox.

Just setting the table width to 100% for some reason really screws up MSIE into ignoring it and producing a tiny verson of the screen.

My idea is to do some basic browser type testing and use completely different outputs for the two browsers so that you get the same look and feel. With the page in PHP that is fairly easy to do.

4

Can you tell me which “go-daddy” package I would need to create a "display-live site?

5

Their economy package at $3.95 per month looks good enough. Bandwidth allowance is 25gb which should be more than enough.

6

Thanks Rain Maker