digital content lasts forever. — or five years, whichever comes first.
Jeff Rothenberg, 1999
folderHorizon is a standalone program that reads the files contained in your folders and generates a publication in static HTML format. The result can be distributed either offline or online/website and being static makes it independent of external services or databases.
folderHorizon is designed for non-programmers and for anyone who needs to
consolidate their digital content into a readable and durable format.
No-Code! The "programming work" is about organizing folders and files
and anyone with a computer is familiar with this primary archiving approach.
folderHorizon does all the rest of the coding work.
Uzip and run folderHorizon executable in its directory
(double-click on Win and Mac [1])
it creates the folderHorizonWorks/Archives/ working directory for your archives.
[1] Mac users may need to 'force' folderHorizon (and maybe ffmpeg)
because detected as "from an unidentified developer".
Open System Settings. Click Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click the Open Anyway
button...
The warning prompt reappears and... you can click Open.
Full documentation
The first interface are folders and files in folderHorizonWorks/Archives/
directory where you organize your content.
folderHorizon reads, processes, monitors and display them using your system browser.
The terminal has simple menus that allows to select actions and options.
The start menu (a full example with many archives)
===========================================
folderHorizon
Working archive: 'My Siberia' (456 MB)
========================================
Press Enter to view
3 other archives to build
========================================
1 : Hugo Brain Website (3 MB)
2 : Wordpress Headache (701 MB)
3 : Wrong Photos (68 MB)
========================================
Type a number and press Enter
Options
========================================
n : create a new archive
q : quit the program
========================================
Type a letter and press Enter
:
Live options menu
Live options
===========================================
c : disable empty caption files
a : change the asset directory
l : change the layout file
r : release the final archive
q : quit the program
===========================================
Type a letter and press Enter
or just press Enter to update
:
On archive content changes (same as [UPDATE CHANGES] page button)
-----------------------------
The Archive has been modified
Press Enter to update changes
-----------------------------
:
There are two levels of folder in the archive directory: sections/ contain
projects/ that contains files and captions.
Unicode characters are supported in folder and file names.
Some characters or patterns like '@', 'number #' and '#priv'
are reserved for special functions (explained in this document).
* image jpg|jpeg|jpe|png|tif|tiff|bmp|pict|webp|gif|svg * video mp4|avi|mpg|mpeg|mkv|m2v|vob|oggvideo|mov|3gp|webm|wmv|flv * audio mp3|flac|wav|aif|aiff|ogg|m4a|aac * document any downloadable except for ones above and .txt files reserved for captions
The name of 'sections' and 'projects' folders it is used by the program to build menus with links to the content. You can make as many sections and projects as you want.
The files are read only at second level of project folders, files in section folder will be ignored by the program.
folderHorizon reads your archive tree in alphabetical order. You can change the order of folders and files by adding a prefix to their name. The prefix is a number followed by an hash symbol, example:
1 # Your file or folder name
2 # Another file or folder name
| it forces 'Another...' after 'Your...'
Leading zero numbers, 01, 001, 02 etc. and whitespaces before/after the
hash symbol are allowed.
The program trims the prefix keeping your sorting.
Some projects could have the same name/title with different versions or series.
Use the @ character as separator in the projects folder name so the page menu
can show them as a group.
Folders name:
My Project Title @ October Series My Project Title @ December Series
Menu:
My Project Title - October Series - December Series
Note: project folder name can contain only one @ character.
Any file can have a text caption with title and description.
When the "empty caption files" option is enabled, folderHorizon
creates an empty .txt file for each file in the same folder.
When disabled, you have to create manually your caption files.
The caption file has the same name (extension included) as the file it describes.
Example:
MyImageFile.jpg (your file) MyImageFile.jpg.txt (caption of file)
Open the .txt file with a simple text/code editor:
The first line is the title The other lines are the description of file content...
This option also supports a pre-formatted text template. A file named [captions-template].txt placed in the archive folder will replace the 'empty' captions text with its content.
folderHorizon automatically tries to extract the preview image from
your video files.
If it doesn't succeed, or if you do not like the result, you can set your .jpg image
in the same folder of video using a strategy similar to the captions:
name the image with the same name of your video (extension included) adding the suffix
-videoposter.jpg
MyVideoFile.avi (your video) MyVideoFile.avi-videoposter.jpg (video poster/preview) MyVideoFile.avi.txt (caption...)
The Search finds the text occurrences the HTML/Text pages, in the file captions and in the
[tags].txt files.
You can create a file named [tags].txt and write your tags/keywords in any context/folder.
example:
#wild#badgers#foxes#wolves
The search input accepts multiple words using the pipe character | a separator,
example: motorcycle|helicopter
Any report of malfunction is welcome and will be evaluated as soon as possible.
If you think you have a malfunction while updating changes in the archive, there is
an easy way to reset the building/updating:
Do not open the archive links in "new browser tab" during the developement,
it affects the status/changes script.
The 'Search' page has no status/changes script so it opens result links in "new browser tab".
Is suggested to close the multiple tabs result when you modify the archive folders/files.