This is the feedback about Art HTML Listing that we received from one of our clients.

Hello,

I just want to say how much I appreciate your Art HTML Listing program. I bought it online form you just this past weekend. I do the general management at a university institute here in ... and have set up an intranet to give our people (22 in total) information to help with their project work including access to frequently used documents. Until now, if I wanted to include a document, I had to use my html program (NetObjects Fusion) to add it and to create the link to it. This is easy in NetObjects, but it still requires me to do it.

I wanted a way for people - not just me - to be able to drop a document into a folder and have it automatically appear for download. And I wanted it to be simple for the people adding documents so they didn't have to worry about naming conventions or anything. I just wanted them to be able to work on a document, then drop it to the Documents folder on the webserver. I looked at a number of potential solutions including a program called Net-It Central which automatically creates a website from documents dropped into a directory. It converts the documents to Flash for viewing in a browser and uploads a shortened name version of the original document for downloading. This would have worked fine, but it is very expensive, so we couldn't have afforded it anyway, and I realised that, in trialling it, all I really needed was it's ability to create a hierarchical menu, and that the conversion to Flash paper wasn't necessary. Mostly our people would have browsed to the page, then downloaded the document itself. All of our people have all of the necessary programs on their local machines to read the documents, so all I needed was a browsable list of documents.

Your program does exactly that for a fraction of the cost.

I've set it up to point to the directory in question. Every hour, I have autoscheduled it to run three .ahl projects directed at that directory. The files it creates are the html files in the screen grab below:

W:\Documents is our intranet server root directory. It is mapped on my local machine, for my development purposes, as a network drive. W:\Documents\Documents is the folder within the intranet that I have created for our people to browse for non-html documents and for some of them to be able to just drop documents into.

contents.html is created in this root directory only and is a collapsible hierarchical list of all non-html files in the whole Documents\Documents directory. This is the file I include in my intranet for our people to browse for documents. I've incorporated it into an iframe in an intranet page, so it just integrates to the rest of the intranet. And that page (the one with the iframe) is dynamic since it updates on the hour after a document is added.

index.html is created in every folder of Documents\Documents and lists the non-html files in each directory. I can use it to create refereces to a particular sub-folder on other intranet pages. On one page, I've included the index.html file for a sub-folder in another iframe to dynamically show just the files I want in that sub-directory.

path.html is for me only. It is created in this root directory only and references just the index.html files. It gives me the URL of any sub-directory by simply clicking on the link to any index.html file it displays. I can then copy and use those URLs as links in the rest of my intranet site.

I've detailed all of this because I thought you might be interested in some case studies or example solutions.

It's a simple to use program which does exactly what it says it will do and works exceedingly well.

Thanks.

Dallas