Bucky Barkley

 

Configuring And Using WebMon

1. Web Addresses
2. HoverText
3. Labels
4. Search
5. Giving A Folder Of Notes
6. Giving A Copy Of Your Links
7. Background Screen – use in other objects

WebMon is configured by editing the “urls” notecard in the inventory of the object.

1. Give It Web Addresses

The format for adding web addresses to WebMon is:

Some Description = http://someaddress

example:

New York Times = http://www.nytimes.com

You can add many addresses. Thirty or so should be easy to do. The limitation is that each address takes up some memory — shorter descriptions and urls will let you add more, but will be more difficult for the user to understand.

2. Hovering Text

There are two means of adding a floating title to the WebMon object:

1. Change the object description
2. Use the titleText option in the urls notecard

Changing the object description looks like this example:

Note that you can use “\n” to display multiple lines of text.

The other means of setting title text is to use the “titleText” option in the urls notecard. That looks like:

titleText = WebMon 2.5\nClick for Web

You also have control over text color, by using “titleColor” to specify the RGB colors:

titleColor = <0,0,255>

Another item you can set is the transparency, via “titleAlpha”:

titleAlpha = 0.9

note that 0 is fully transparent, and 1.0 is opaque. The example is at 90%.

You may not want any floating text. There are a couple of ways of doing away with it:

• Set transparency to 0
• or leave the description blank, and do not use the titleText option

3. Labels

The buttons in the dialog can be changed. You may have a different way of saying “Notes!”, or may want to translate entirely. Here is a sample dialog:

Note the top two rows of buttons. They may all be changed.

A sample change in the urls notecard:

buttonNext = Next >>
buttonPrev = << Prev
buttonSearch = Search!
buttonGetLinks = Links!
buttonNotes = Notes!
buttonHelp = Help!

Results in:

The numbered buttons always correspond to a web address above.

4. Search

Pressing the Search button gives the user 30 seconds to type in a search term on an open chat channel. The search looks for a match among the web address titles and links. Here is the sample instruction:

We’ll do a chat command to search for the New York Times:

/33 ny

And we get:

Note that the user is given instruction on how to go directly to the site via a chat command (in this case: “/33 3″)

5. Giving A Folder Of Notes

You can put one or more notecards into inventory, to be given out when the user clicks on “GiveNotes” (or however you label that button via “buttonNotes”).

For each note to be given out, the name should start with “NOTE.”:

NOTE.example

The user will be given a folder containing the note(s). You can control the name of the folder via the “folderName” option in the urls notecard:

folderName = Sample WebMon Notes

6. Giving A Copy Of Your Links

Giving out the urls file simply provides a means for the user to benefit from your collection of links for some WebMon object. They can certainly see all of your links by searching on a colon ‘:’ — giving them the actual notecard makes it a little easier to dispense the same information.

To enable this button, put a comment line anywhere in the urls notecard.

# a comment line starts with a hash mark (an octothorpe, or pound sign)

7. Background Screen – use in other objects

By default, WebMon will change the background screen. If you toss a texture into the inventory and call it “background”, it will use that.

If you are attempting to use the script in a different object, you may not want it to change any textures. So, two things to know:

1. If the object name starts with anything besides “WebMon”, it wont change the texture upon startup
2. If you want to refer to a texture where you know the key, there is a new option that can be used in the “urls” file — “backgroundTexture” (more below)

The “backgroundTexture” option in the urls notecard looks like this:

# show me the default plywood: backgroundtexture = 89556747-24cb-43ed-920b-47caed15465f

To get the key for a texture (must be copiable) from your main inventory, you right click on the texture and choose “copy asset UUID”. That puts it on the clipboard for pasting.

To prevent the background from being changed:

# don't change the background:
backgroundtexture = 0

Note: Changing the background affects face #1 in the root prim.