EvoCam integrated into iWeb page...comments welcomed!

I'm using EvoCam ( http://www.evological.com) with the built-in iSight camera on my iMac. EvoCam has a built-in java web server, so all that is involved is to enable this server to serve the streaming images. The hardest part is opening up ports in the router and forwarding port 8080 to the local machine. This varies with your router so you'll have to pull out the manual. As for integrating it into the iWeb page, you just add a bit of html like any other...

<----APPLET CODEBASE="http://1.2.3.4:8080" ARCHIVE="evocam.jar" CODE="com.evological.evocam.class" WIDTH=320 HEIGHT=240>
<PARAM NAME="video" VALUE="video.cgi">
<PARAM NAME="archive" VALUE="evocam.jar">
</APPLET---->

Remove the dashes "----" for before using and change the URL to reflect your WAN IP.

==> www.DirtDoog.com <==</a>
Place A Virtual Pin On Putt-Putt's GuestMap!

Alright!

Just use a blank page. That's all you need. You can make it show up wherever you want on the page! Just follow the following directions...

The general directions are as follows...

1. Decide where you want your webcam window and know exactly what dimensions you need (640x480 or 320x240)

2. Insert a text box onto your page and adjust its size to exactly your dimensions and move it wherever you want it on your page.

3. Type in some uniquely identifiable text like, "EVOCAMCODE" without changing the font or anything else...just type it in.

4. Publish your page with iWeb.

5. Find the html file associated with your published page (either on your iDisk or in a folder depending on how you published) and open it in any text editor (like Microsoft Word, or Textedit, or anything).

6. Scroll through the html file and locate your placeholder text, e.g. "EVOCAMCODE".

7. Replace the placeholder text with code snippet and publish your page.

That's it! So positioning the text box in iWeb determines exactly where on the page your cam will show up!

Come back here and post as soon as you have it all set up!

==> www.DirtDoog.com <==</a>
Place A Virtual Pin On Putt-Putt's GuestMap!

Evocam lets you insert your webcam on any html page
by putting <EVOCAM></EVOCAM>

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Yes, you can have the webcam be an element on any web page just like any other graphical element...using the html code provided. The instructions above do exactly that.

Is there any reason I couldn't do that on an iWeb
page?

Nevermind... I guess it's because I would have to
constantly update my iDisk???

No reason at all. Put it on any iWeb page you like. As long as you don't change the page in any way in the future, you won't have to insert the code again. Keep in mind that anytime the navigation menu changes, all your pages that show the menu get changed. Inserting HTML code after publishing with iWeb becomes pretty routine once you do it. Anyway with tools like MassReplaceIt, it's all pretty easy and fairly automated. I still prefer to do it by hand. I currently add StatCounter, GuestMap, my custom Gallery code, iChat status, birthday ticker, and now WebCam. Still takes less than 10 minutes to drag and drop my code into the pages in Microsoft Word. I just have a folder with all these code snippets. Everytime I republish, I just drag and drop away!

Anyway... I am trying to fix this so let me know if
it works when you try the link.

Right now, the password protect works, so I take it that you have it as a separate "site" in iWeb. That's a pretty good strategy. Will iWeb not directly link your "WebCam" text to the other site? Maybe you can set up a redirect. Anyways, I see your placeholder box for EvoCam and everything, just no code. I assume that once you update, it'll work. Good job!

==> www.DirtDoog.com <==</a>
Place A Virtual Pin On Putt-Putt's GuestMap!

How did you get it to display photos when the webcam
is not running? Does Evocam do that? What are the
settings?

I'm still exploring a lot of the functionality so far. You can add layers to the webcam image, including things like clocks and text and images that are referred to as "badges". Look under this option under "items" and you will see an option for image or QT movie. This is how I am doing things currently.

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to turn the camera off and just display an image. There's an option for "Offline image", but it doesn't see to work with the built in streaming server. Is that what you are using?

==> www.DirtDoog.com <==</a>
Place A Virtual Pin On Putt-Putt's GuestMap!

No, it won't sabotage your computer or anything. And it is definitely possible with an iSight through EvoCam. I didn't know much (and still don't) about HTML, but it's been a good experience digging through it all. And at the end, the solution works very well! I'll be happy to walk you through things. I had to take down my webcam page for the time being because I switched to cable modem recently and all the incoming ports seem to be blocked. So Sad.

1) In the post where you gave the code, you talk
about opening ports and enabling streaming. And WAN
IP. It's like a language I've heard but don't
understand 🙂 Can you help me go through these
steps?

Most people access the internet through routers these days, so in order to have requests for your webcam routed to the right machine behind the router, you have to tell the router two things....what kind of traffic to forward and where exactly to forward it to. The port number is used to basically describe the kind of traffic, in this case requests to see you webcam. Then you need to tell your router to forward all traffic on this port number to the specific mac on which you have evocam and your iSight running.

2) How much code to replace with your snippet - just
the placeholder text, or some of the surrounding text
"0pt; ">evocam

"?

Just replace the placeholder text....."evocam" in your example. You did your text box just perfectly....so the code snippet will go right between the > <.