If you look at the top left of this page, you'll see a ticker tape news reader, slowly scrolling the headlines. This one is configured to open the links in the same window as the ticker, handy for links within your own site.
The ticker below is a longer version for displaying in a prominent position on your site to grab attention. It's configured to open the links in a new window, making it ideal to link to articles on other sites.
Usage
- Download the tickers by clicking here
- Unzip "tickers.zip" to get "ticker_horizontal.swf" and "ticker_vertical.swf"
- There are three sample ticker configuration files included - "ticker_h.txt" for the horizontal ticker ,"ticker_v.txt" for the vertical ticker and "ticker.txt" to control both of them at the same time.
Customise the tickers
By default, each ticker will look for the
file "ticker.txt" in the same directory as the ".swf"
file. So, if you have put the ticker in "www.yoursite.com/news/ticker_horizontal.swf",
then you must put the configuration file in "www.yoursite.com/news/ticker.txt".
If you're comfortable with the embedded PARAM tags for the Flash
object in the HTML page, you can override the default configuration
file by specifying the name of another configuration file on the
query string to the Flash object. Just look for a line in the HTML
file that looks like:
<param name="movie"
value="ticker_horizontal.swf">
and change it to:
<param name="movie"
value="ticker_horizontal.swf?config=new_config_file.txt">
Do a "View->Source" on this page to see how the top
left ticker overrides the default configuration file.
By overriding and providing a configuration file for each instance
of the ticker, you can have as many tickers on your page as you
want, all displaying and linking to different articles/sites!
"ticker.txt" contains the customisation features.
Note that each tag is enclosed in & &. Leave them this way
as this is how Flash loads variables from a text file. If you put
the ticker on your page and all you see is "Config Error",
then chances are there's a missing & in the configuration file.
no_of_articles
- This controls how many article headlines are to be displayed:
e.g. no_of_articles=5 (to display 5 articles)
text_display_time - This
controls how long each article headline will be
displayed after the ticker has finished building the string. This
is defined in seconds:
e.g. text_display_time=10 (for 10 seconds of display)
background_colour - This
defines the background colour of the ticker. Use this to blend the
ticker into your website colours. The format is standard HTML colour
codes:
e.g. FF0000 = RED, 00FF00
= GREEN, 0000FF = BLUE, 000000
= BLACK, FFFFFF = WHITE
text_colour - This defines
the colour of the text The format is standard HTML colour codes
as defined above.
text_size - This defines
the size of the text. It's defined in points:
e.g. text_size=24 (for big text) text_size=8 (for small text)
underline_text - This controls
whether to underline the text as in an HTML link:
underline_text=yes or underline_text=no
open_in_new_window - This
defines whether the URL is opened in a new window or not:
open_in_new_window=yes - URL opens in a new window
open_in_new_window=no - URL opens in same page as the ticker
If you feel comfortable working with Flash MX actionscript, click here to download the source and change it to suit your needs.