Friday, 19 October 2012

Quickly starting 3 websites on 3 local folders

One of the O2 Platform Tools that I use all the time is the Util - Start .NET WebServer on Local Folder v1.0.exe (752kb) which makes any local folder into an website (via starting Cassini in the background).

So after Buying 3 mobile site-template from ThemeForest and downloading them, I had the need to quickly start a webserver for each one and see that they look like (we can't just open the html pages in a browser since there are *.js and *.css web references that need to be served from a  webserver).

So I started the Util - Start .NET WebServer on Local Folder v1.0.exe  tool locally:


Which looks like this:


Dropped the folder into the top-left box to start the webservice:


Note: if you get this error from Cassini, it probably is because the virtual path is too long (which Cassini doesn't like and you can change in the VPath TextBox)



In this case I set the VPath to / and clicked on 'Restart WebServer', and we now have a local WebServer running on port 56342 on the dropped path (note that if you close the O2 tool, the webserver process will bt terminated):



Now if you look at the unzipped files, the folder we want as the web root is not the main unzipped one, but the one where the index.html file is (which is different on each of the 3 themes I downloaded).

Here is what each one of theme looks like:

EyeCandy:


Woody:


Spina:



Viewing Woody's Doc's site (which also need a local webserver to be viewed properly):