en Passant not letting life just pass on by

One of my first contract jobs was for a small IT company in the area. I worked with them for about 4 months before a permanent, salaried position came along. (Sorry, I like having someone else pay for the benifits) One of the most memorable things the owner shown me was his background.

Now, he was a very private person, so I don't mean his personal background. I mean the 'desktop' image that he had on his computer. It consisted of virtually hundreds of links to websites and resources that he used regularly. Over the last few years, I have attempted various methods to recreate it. It's a really easy concept, create a webpage, add links to it, and set it as your background.

That brings me to my latest script. First it reads the contents of a special folder, containing several desktop sized images. I have been enjoying the art by this artist. (These are especially great because he has one specific to my widescreen monitor resolution 1680x1050. ) The script randomly picks one for the background. Next it reads a short CSV file on my local computer containing URLs and titles for various resources I connect to regularly. The script creates links to these resources in the HTML. (They can be several layers deep if you want too! Personally, I put similar resources on the same line (gmail, yahoo mail, etc.) The final step overwrites an existing HTML file on my computer. I run the script as part of my logoff routine, so it's available next time I logon.

Variants of this background file have included live feeds from web cameras, weather maps and even graphs of system performance. I have also added portions to this script to have it set the background to the newly created HTML file, but since it never changes, it isn't quite necessary. Since I am still using a table to layout the page, the latest revision of this script defines the left and right columns using the screen's actual width, not percentages.

Have Fun!