Tutorials - Active Desktop

With Internet Explorer 4+ installed on your computer, you can have what is called Active Desktops. They are webpages on your windows desktop. You can get your webpage on other peoples desktops by making your own cdf file which people run and make your page the background.

All you need to do is copy the following code into a NotePad document and save it as a .cdf file.

You can then use this picture to link your cdf file as you would any other file, , so they can 'install' your Active Desktop.

Here is what is in our cdf file...

<?XML VERSION="1.0" ENCODING="UTF-8"?>

<CHANNEL>

<ITEM HREF="http://www.jc2k.com">
<TITLE>Java City Desktop Component</TITLE>
<USAGE VALUE="DesktopComponent">
<OpenAs VALUE="HTML" />
<Width VALUE="508" />
<Height VALUE="520" />

</USAGE>
</ITEM>
</CHANNEL>

I suggest you just copy the above yellow text, stick it in NotePad, save it as desk.cdf and just change the relevent details such as...

ITEM HREF thi is the page that will be displayed on the desktop. You could setup a special page for this or just do what I've done and use my homepage.
TITLE change the title to your own title.
Width VALUE this is the size in pixels of the desktop space to take up for your active desktop, don't make it to big because people don't really want your page to take up all the room on their desktop.
Height VALUE same as Width but the height!

It will only work when people click on the link on-line, not off-line. Now let people add your page by using the very top image and link it to the cdf file, so it will look like this...