jwcolby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Tue Aug 4 10:00:32 CDT 2009
I have rebuilt my Windows Home Server. One of the things WHS allows is to add a web page that can then be accessed from outside of your network. To see the public face just go to Colby.Homeserver.com It ended up being fairly trivial to get that working, three port forwarding entries in the router and allowing WHS software to do something to the router (scary when you haven't a clue what that something is). WHS uses IIS to then serve up this web page. Log-in allows users that you define to see shares on the server. Typically it is used to share photos and video, but it can really be any directory share in a certain path on WHS, all set up by user / password / directory / rights. Oh, and it also allows a remote access to other machines on the network, though I haven't gotten there yet. Anyway... The access to the shared directory is usable but crude, photos have to be "downloaded" and displayed in an application of your choice on the remote computer. So someone came up with an add-in called WHIIST which allows you to create a photo album where you simply create directories and then drag and drop photos into directories, again in a path specific to this album, and voila, the visitor sees photos that you place there. To give you a taste of how this works I have created a temporary user / password: User: AccessD PW: ^6tfc%5rdx Go to: colby.Homeserver.com and login to see the shared directory where you can add, delete and modify anything in that directory. which you can use to access specific directories and see some photos at: colby.homeserver.com/AccessD Give it a whirl. I will be taking this AccessD user down in a day or two so try it now if you want to see what WHS and WHIIST can do. This whole AccessD thing took about 20 minutes to get working using this WHIIST add-in. I have created my own custom user for my extended family, and placed a huge quantity of photos out there. What would be really nice is to be able to add captions etc and that is where this WHIIST add-in stops short. It is EXTREMELY easy to set up, create directories for "albums", drag photos in, and you are done... but what you see is what you get. OTOH, this web page is just an IIS creation and so I should be able to find some other tool for creating photo albums which has more flexibility. Which brings me to the my question, do any of you folks use an album widget on a web page which has the ability to add captions and such. I am not into complexity so if it is a lot of work I will just stay with what I have. The photos are the objective, captions are just icing, which I would like, but not if the cost is too high. Thanks, -- John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com