Standalone website

I want to make a website to mail to someone. It needs to be standalone and playable with any modern web browser. I would like to package it so that the person just needs to open and play it.

1 Is this something that is being done?
2 Are there “best practices”?
3 Is this something doable in RW?
4 Are there themes, plugins or stacks that simplify or streamline the process?

If your website is simple, you may try to convert it to an e-book. I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve heard the process is not as simple as it sounds, even if you use a dedicated app, like ‘Calibre’…

Thanks,

Can I embed html into an eBook? and have it work just like a web page? Any examples of this out in the wild?

What kind of html?
eBooks are mostly html code anyway.

HTML5? How many kinds are there? :rofl:

Essentially I want it to be cross platform and be able to to run an html that is rendered from Keynote. I could have the user just click on the “index” link that Keynote produces. But if possible I would like to have it look a little less techie.

An icon that packaged , i.e. hid, the html folder and could be clicked on would be optimal. Plan B would be to put the html package inside another program that had such an icon.Then the user could just open that, and click on a link to the index file.

I hope that makes sense.

It is far easier to upload a site to the server and send a link. You can easily password protect the page, so no one else can access it.

2 Likes

Thanks much for your suggestion.

I agree it is far easier for me. That said, the place and way the products will be used preclude using on the web. They don’t have internet access. Is there a way I can embed that link on a word processor page or other page, the user clicks on some spot on that page and the website opens locally? The rest I have already figured out.

If they can’t use the internet…I would go with a pdf!!

1 Like

How do I get PDFs to maintain html effects?

You would have to loose some.
Even if you made an app…you would have to build several to get it to work on all devices.

Can you show me a url to a page you want to convert?

From some of the responses posted I think I have failed to be clear about my needs. I will try to clear it up.

I have a .html file/folder [A] rendered to my desktop. In the file/folder is another folder [B] that contains the contents and an index file. That file/folder [A] is the “stand alone website”.

The procedure now is for the user to click on the index.html file inside [A] which opens the contents. From there the person can navigate the contents.

I am looking for a better way to present the “stand alone website”. Instead of clicking on the “index” file/link, or worse messing around inside the contents folder, the user would be presented with an icon or link on a “pretty page” through which they would enter the contents unaware of the mechanics under the hood. Another way to imagine it is a “one click link” into the .html folder which hides the .html folder from the user.

I hope this is a better explanation of what I am looking for.

Thanks for all the effort.

If your site is totally html/css (no php) you may be able to change the file links setting to relative to website address in RW general settings/advanced. And get it to run on the local computer with no web server.

1 Like

Why not SiteSuck the entire site and mail it as a zip. When unzipped user can click the index file and view in any browser.

https://ricks-apps.com/osx/sitesucker/index.html

Is the website completed? If so the easiest and cleanest way to go about this would be with an ePub. If you need interactive forms that provide feedback to you then it won’t work. For you to get the communication it would require a connection to the internet in some way.

That said if you use Apple Pages you can certainly make an ePub with a table of contents and endnotes (similar to footnotes). This would be fully responsive and contain only a single file. Link below.

The other option is to set your RW document to relative and export to folder. All images, css, js script files, everything would need to be locally stored, not warehoused. Then export the project to a folder. The whole folder becomes the file that would be sent to your client. They would need to navigate the folder to find the index.html and start from there.

1 Like

Is it on your desktop or someone else’s Machine?

The original post said you want to “package it.” I’m assuming you want to somehow distribute the website?

I understand you want no internet access so somehow these users are going to get the website loaded onto their machine.

Of course, what others have said about no PHP, all files need to be local, etc.

A fewf things I want to note;

  1. you shouldn’t need to set “relative to website address”.
  2. you will have to uncheck the “Tidy Website Links” in advanced settings.
  3. If the theme you are using uses the “web Address Field” for links back to the home page (often the logo) then that might cause a problem.

It sounds as if you already may have figured these parts out.

As for a “cleaner link” I think without knowing how the website is getting onto the machine, and what kind of device they are using it’s going to be hard to say.

So I can set up a local website that is all HTML(no tidy links) and place it anywhere on my Mac I want. I can then go to my index.html (for the home page) and right-click it in finder create an alias, call it anything I want, even change the folder image and place that Alias on my desktop. If I click the alias it opens the website fine.

Now that works on my machine, but there isn’t any easy way to do that in some kind of bundle that I could give you or anyone else to use on your Mac. The reason is the alias’s “Original Address” will contain volume and maybe a user name.

Thanks everyone for your effort to help me.

There is an app called Fluid that turns a website into a Mac app. I bought it a while ago, but have only tested very simple things with it. Doesn’t support windows though. Details here: https://www.fluidapp.com/

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.