Using Xara Presentation Site for Highly Customisable Content Slideshows

[Boy]

I am still having the same problem. Using Chrome from within DPX the presentation works but when I double-click the index.htm file in the export folder it does not.

[toejam]

Will take a look at this to see if it can work for a rotating banner ad. Still think this is a basic functioning widget that Xara should provide as standard with their product.

[toejam]

I must have goofed somewhere. I did a 4 page presentation to simulate 4 banner ads. When the page starts up it goes through each of the 4 pages, but, when it reloops, it blanks out the whole window and just shows the 4 presentation pages, loosing all the website content.

I still have issues with web designer resizing my banner ads, but, that's on another thread.

I think I've managed to attach my presentation and web file to this message.

presentation.web
cla.web

[Acorn]

I must have goofed somewhere. I did a 4 page presentation to simulate 4 banner ads. When the page starts up it goes through each of the 4 pages, but, when it reloops, it blanks out the whole window and just shows the 4 presentation pages, loosing all the website content.

I still have issues with web designer resizing my banner ads, but, that's on another thread.

I think I've managed to attach my presentation and web file to this message.

presentation.web
cla.web

OK, I've slaughtered your design of Presentation.web.

You were missing the third Placeholder that I have added to the first presentation) page. It need this to restart the presentation;

<script type="text/javascript">
  setInterval(function () { window.location.replace("presentation.htm"); }, 5000);
</script>

What I then did was add a fifth page that copied the slide of the first.
Where I did the butchering was to discard your bitmap-rendered rectangle (yellow on red); you simply do not need to render your slides as a 95 dpi image.
i replaced it with a rectangle and some text. The rectangle has a transparency; the text was changed to 3D.
Each has a separate URL: the background goes to Google; the text goes to DuckDuckGo.

The timing is still not right as the transition from slide 5 to the first should be tidier, but that's for you to experiment with.

presentation with tacky 3D.web

Acorn

[boomish]

HI Acorn, I've been trying to do this as well and there is a bug somewhere, testing the files you've put up I can see it all exactly as you describe but it won't play in Chrome, if I open it with explorer it asks to run blocked script, in Chrome it does nothing, even if I use your portrait Presentation Control & Portraight presentation files. Although I fi go to your example link of the same thing that works in Chrome.

I'm think this will be the solution for me to show off a lot of Album covers (200) I've had no luck using the gallery widgets , I can get them to work after a lot of work resizing but there are too any pictures, if I use a Slideshow possibly a few on same page I could have it scroll if you get what I mean. The Nivo Slider is good but it's fixed at Landscape..
Appreciate if you got any suggestions or tips , this custom content slideshow could be just the thing if I can get it to work.

[toejam]

Thank you for taking a look at it. I did put the 3rd placeholder in, but, in the wrong place. I got your presentation to cycling through and it does loop through, with a little hesitation at the end, but, that is mainly noticeable when the images cycle through quickly. In the real world application the ads will cycle through about every 10 seconds - really depends upon the average site viewing times from my site statistics. Also, the real world application either will have advertisers provide me with their banner ad, or we will build one for them. The dummy images I made were used for testing purposes - so, they probably weren't all that pretty.

Now, the problem I'm still having is that when I open the website (not the presentation), the presentation cycles through it's ads at the top, just like I want them to. After they cycle through one full set the page leaves the website and goes to a new page that shows the presentation slide show cycling through continuously. I'm unsure why it leaves the website and goes to just showing the presentation, but, that's what it's doing. I'm using Firefox, don't know if it's a browser specific issue.

I do appreciate all your efforts and applaud your tenacity in tackling this issue. Thank you for your assistance and hope you're staying warm as the arctic breeze blows across the nation this weekend.

[Acorn]

I'll need to see your actual site to be able to work out what's amiss.
Acorn

[toejam]

Here it is, I think. Always iffy when trying to get a file uploaded to forums.

[xtom]

This is pretty cool Acorn. I wrestled with this for a few hours today because I needed to do something like this for a customer ie. a narrow banner with sliding text right to left and resizing the widgets can sometimes be awkward. I'm just going to share what I ended up doing incase anyone is interested. So instead of doing a presentation document, I tried a supersite. I think these are pretty much the same thing and use the same transition code except I think with a supersite you don't need to hide the presentation controls. However in doing this I found I needed to enable "Scale to Fit screen" otherwise the iframe scrollbars for some reason refused to hide, but the good thing is that it seems to scale to fit whatever iframe size I set so that's probably best even though I matched the sizes up anyway. I then found if you preview it locally it wouldn't play in chrome, but if you upload it to a live website it works fine. I also experimented with the page cycling code and came up with an alternative version below. If you duplicate the first page to the last page and set the first page transition to instant it works pretty good, the only niggle is that it will display the first/last page twice as long as the other pages. I had to do this because it seems to reverse the page transition when it goes back to the start which didn't look good for what I was trying. So a different way but maybe not much advantage over reloading the page but just thought I would share my endeavors anyway. It's a bit awkward but definitely an interesting way to create custom banners/content sliders.

<script type="text/javascript">

// first page transition should be set to instant
// last page should be a duplicate of first page except transition can be whatever
// make sure to set the total number of pages here
var number_of_pages = 4;

var pageNum = 0;
var lastPageNum = number_of_pages-1;
setInterval(function () {

pageNum =  pageNum + 1;
if  (pageNum>lastPageNum){pageNum=0;}
xr_spapp(pageNum);

}, 5000);

</script>

[Acorn]

This is pretty cool Acorn. I wrestled with this for a few hours today because I needed to do something like this for a customer ie. a narrow banner with sliding text right to left and resizing the widgets can sometimes be awkward. I'm just going to share what I ended up doing incase anyone is interested. So instead of doing a presentation document, I tried a supersite. I think these are pretty much the same thing and use the same transition code except I think with a supersite you don't need to hide the presentation controls. However in doing this I found I needed to enable "Scale to Fit screen" otherwise the iframe scrollbars for some reason refused to hide, but the good thing is that it seems to scale to fit whatever iframe size I set so that's probably best even though I matched the sizes up anyway. I then found if you preview it locally it wouldn't play in chrome, but if you upload it to a live website it works fine. I also experimented with the page cycling code and came up with an alternative version below. If you duplicate the first page to the last page and set the first page transition to instant it works pretty good, the only niggle is that it will display the first/last page twice as long as the other pages. I had to do this because it seems to reverse the page transition when it goes back to the start which didn't look good for what I was trying. So a different way but maybe not much advantage over reloading the page but just thought I would share my endeavors anyway. It's a bit awkward but definitely an interesting way to create custom banners/content sliders.

xtom, thank you for sharing. I dip in and out of coding when I have the opportunity. I much prefer this approach as you have complete control over what is happening and displaying.

Acorn