Living References

First let me state that I am more than willing to walk you through this process; so if you get stuck and need help then feel free to contact me at: dabayliss@hotmail.com

That said, this is designed to be as painless and easy as possible; so here are the steps.

Firstly: this program is designed to run against HTML files which exist on your local hard disk. The assumption is that you have these files and that you publish them using MS Frontpage or similar. If you maintain your website some other way then you may need to contact me to see what we can do.

Secondly you need to get the windows program that will be run against your html files.

To ensure you get the latest version of the program, and that I know who is linking to the Explorium, I presently ask that you email me to get the linking program.

When you run the program you will get a dialog with two entry boxes, four buttons and a results window. They each work as follows:

Select root folder: In here you need to enter the location of the top directory of the place on your hard disk where you store your html files. If you do not exactly know where that is then you can select the 'Browse' button; this will bring up a standard windows file browser dialog and you can walk over your hard disk to find the root directory you need. For me the correct value is:

C:\Users\David\Documents\My Web Sites\DabHand

but yours will almost certainly be different!

URL of website: You only need this option if you intend to send me the index file that is created. This URL allows the Explorium to tie the index entries from your hard disk back to your website. You need to type in here the URL of the root of your website. For me the correct entry is:

www.dabhand.org

but again yours will certainly be different.

Titles: This button does not do anything to your files; rather it reads all of your files to ensure that they have a 'Title' entry in them. Any HTML files which do not have a TITLE entry will be noted in the results window. This is not fatal; but it does mean that the Explorium will only be able to display the URL for the link; not the title of the page. I do recommend that you fix your titles when you get a chance.

Scan: Again this option does not do anything to your files; it does however tell you everything it would do given the chance. For every document it finds in which it could insert links it will tell you how many links it would like to insert. At the bottom of the list it will tell you the number of html files you have and the number of links it would like to put in there. If you are running this process for the second or subsequent time (which is perfectly ok) it will tell you how many of those links are new ones.

Do: The output from the Do button is exactly the same on the screen as for the scan; the difference is that the program will actually have edited your files and inserted hyperlinks into the Bible Explorium. Just in case you are of a nervous disposition it will also have created an 'original copy' of your html file which will have the extension ".bak"

In addition it will have created a file 'references.txt' in the directory specified by "Select root folder"; this is a list of all of the hyperlinks in your document. If you email it to me I will integrate it into the Explorium itself; so that when a user looks at that verse a link to the relevant page in your website will be displayed.

In summary, this is a very simple program to operate. But if you get stuck please feel free to contact me at the email address at the top of the screen.