Using Snippets Active Dashboard: BookMark and Page Agent

Introduction

This is an online tutorial that explains how to add a BookMark or Page Agent snippet to your Snippets Active Dashboard desktop drawer. Before beginning this tutorial, you should have Active Dashboard installed.

When you complete this tutorial, you should be able to:

• Add a new BookMark or Page Agent snippet to your Active Dashboard desktop drawer, and
• Understand the mechanism for adding new snippets to the drawer and configuring them.

About BookMark and Page Agent

BookMark and PageAgent are two snippets provided in the standard Active Dashboard gallery included in every installation of Active Dashboard. BookMark provides similar functionality to a Favorite site or Bookmark in your web browser: you click on a BookMark snippet and it loads the associated web page in your browser. Page Agent is a bit more sophisticated: it monitors a web site, notifying you of changes according to a schedule you determine.

This tutorial looks at adding and configuring both a BookMark and a Page Agent snippet. We start with the general process of choosing a snippet to add to the Active Dashboard desktop drawer.

Choosing a snippet to add to the drawer

First, let's take a look at the Active Dashboard desktop drawer right after installing Active Dashboard:

In the screenshot above, the desktop drawer has two default snippets: a Mr. Searchy web search snippet, and an Active Dashboard help snippet. The rightmost button is highlighted in red; this is the Add button, which lets you begin the process of adding a snippet to the drawer.

Clicking the Add button causes the Gallery window to display, as in the screenshot below:

The Gallery displays the various snippets available for placement in the Active Dashboard desktop drawer. The left-hand pane of the Gallery allows you to change the way the right-hand pane lists the available snippets. In the image above, we have highlighted the Gallery entries for the BookMark and Page Agent snippets.

Let's take a closer look at the contents of the Gallery:

Observe that a small Add button appears to the left of each listed snippet. We have highlighted the buttons for the BookMark and Page Agent snippets. Clicking this button will take you to the associated snippet's configuration window, which lets you set up the snippet before it is added to the desktop drawer. (The snippet configuration window can also be accessed for a snippet that has already been added to the desktop drawer, so if you don't get the configuration correct before the snippet is added to the drawer, don't worry—you can always go back and fix it later.)

That's all that's required to choose a snippet to add to the desktop drawer. Let's review the steps:

1. Click the Add button on the desktop drawer.
2. Find the desired snippet in the list in the Gallery.
3. Click the Add button next to the snippet you want to add.

Now let's look at how to configure the snippets. We'll start with BookMark and then see how to configure Page Agent.

Configuring BookMark

In this section we look at how to configure the BookMark snippet. We start from the snippet's configuration window, which we come across as we first add the BookMark snippet to the Active Dashboard desktop drawer. The window can also be accessed from the context menu (right-click menu) of the snippet if it's already in the desktop drawer.

Configuring a BookMark is a straightforward process: we tell the snippet which web page to aim the bookmark at, give the bookmark a name, and choose what the snippet should look like. Here's what the configuration window looks like:

The fields in the BookMark configuration window are:

• URL: Type or paste the address (called a URL) of the web page you want to link to with the bookmark.
• Bookmark Name: This is a name or label for your bookmark; it will be displayed in the snippet's location in the desktop drawer.
• Background Color: The snippet's appearance in the desktop drawer will take this color as its background.

When you have finished configuring the snippet, click Add (if a new snippet) or Change (if an existing snippet) to finish the configuration step.

Now your Active Dashboard desktop drawer looks like this:

Congratulations! You have successfully added a BookMark snippet to your Active Dashboard desktop drawer.

Configuring Page Agent

Page Agent gives you a way to focus on important data on a web page and keep up-to-date on changes to that data. Reflecting its richer set of features, its configuration window is a bit more complex than that of BookMark. Let's take a look at the configuration window:

The fields in the Page Agent configuration window are:

• Page URL: Type or paste the address (called a URL) of the web page you want to monitor with the Page Agent. You can also type "help" (without the quotes) in this field. If you do this, clicking on the snippet after it has been added to the Active Dashboard desktop drawer will bring up a window with instructions on how to configure and use the Page Agent snippet.
• Width and Height: You can set the size of the browser window that appears when you click on the Page Agent.
• X offset and Y offset: This "auto-scrolls" the web page within the browser window to the desired X (horizontal, from left) and Y (vertical, from top) coordinates. Use this setting to center the window on the data you want to watch.
• Link: You can make Page Agent load the web page in your default browser, or in the web browser built into Page Agent. Choose "External" to use your default browser, or "Internal" for the built-in browser.
• Prefetch: If you don't want to wait for the page to load when you click on the Page Agent snippet, you can set Prefetch to "Yes" to make Page Agent load the page in advance and present it to you immediately when you click on the snippet.
• Icon URL: You can make your snippet display an icon representing the page that your Page Agent is monitoring. This helps you distinguish different Page Agent snippets from each other if you have multiple snippets in your desktop drawer. Type or paste the web address (URL) of the icon here.
• Tool Tip: Provide a simple description of the monitored page here. You will see this description when the onscreen pointer hovers over the snippet in the desktop drawer.
• Width: You can set the snippet's width (but not height) in the desktop drawer in order to accommodate icons or text that are wider or narrower than usual.
• Scale: This value sizes the icon to fit within the snippet's display box in the desktop drawer.
• Icon XY: Choose a value from the drop-down list to position the icon within the snippet's display box.
• BG Color: In addition to (or instead of) specifying an icon to display for your Page Agent snippet, you can select a background color for the snippet's display box. Enter a hexadecimal RGB color value in this field. (Here is a page that provides hexadecimal RGB values for a lot of colors.)
• Name: Give your snippet a name; this will display in the snippet's display box in the desktop drawer.
• Color: This is another hexadecimal RGB color value that sets the color of the text that displays your snippet's name in the snippet display box.
• Name XY: Choose a value from the drop-down list to position the snippet's name within the snippet display box.
• Font: Choose a value from the drop-down list to modify the size and style of the text displaying the snippet's name in the snippet display box.
• Lock Parameters: Check this box if you are absolutely sure you do not want to change any of these settings. You cannot undo this action, so use this feature carefully.

Before clicking Add, let's take a look at the scheduling features of Page Agent. You can use these to govern when the Page Agent looks for updates to the web page it's monitoring.

Locate the scheduling features by clicking the arrows next to Edit update schedule and Edit show schedule. The configuration window will expand to display the scheduling configuration controls. Below is a screenshot of these controls:

The fields in the Page Agent scheduling controls are:

• Update Schedule:
  • Update days: You can choose to have the Page Agent check the page for updates every day, on weekdays (Monday thru Friday), weekends (Saturday and Sunday), or on specific days of the week. The checkboxes labeled S, M, T, W, T, F, S represent the days on which the Page Agent should run its update check.
  • Update hours: Choose the hours of the day during which the Page Agent should run its update check. Start and Stop are the starting and stopping times, respectively; the value should represent hours and minutes on a 24-hour clock.
  • Update frequency: Choose how often within its update window the Page Agent should check for changes to the page being monitored. Choose how many hours, minutes, or seconds should elapse between updates.
• Show Schedule:
  • Show days: You can choose when the Page Agent snippet should appear in the Active Dashboard desktop drawer. As with the update schedule, you can choose to display it every day, or only on weekdays, weekends, or specially selected days.
  • Show hours: Choose the hours of the day during which the snippet should appear in the desktop drawer. The snippet will appear at the time specified in Start and will disappear when the time in Stop arrives.

When you have configured the Page Agent and established its schedule for checking for updates and appearing in the desktop drawer, you simply click the Add (if a new snippet) or Change (if an existing snippet) to make your changes take effect. The end result of adding a Page Agent snippet looks like this:

Congratulations! You have successfully added a Page Agent snippet to your Active Dashboard desktop drawer.

Summary

Let's summarize what we've examined in this tutorial:

• Click the Add button on the desktop drawer to open the Snippets Active Dashboard Gallery.
• Find the snippet you want to add and click the Add button next to it.
• Configure your snippet before it is added to the desktop drawer.
  • For BookMark: Provide the URL, name, and color of the bookmark snippet.
  • For Page Agent: Provide settings for the agent window and icon, update schedule, and show schedule.
• Click Add from the snippet configuration window. Voila! The snippet appears in the desktop drawer.

This concludes this tutorial.

© Copyright 2001, 2005 Snippets Software. All rights reserved.