First of all, I develop web sites for a living, and this web site resides on a server at the offices of my web host provider (not on my PC here at home). So, if I'm doing testing on my PC here at home, or if I reboot my PC, or whatever, this web site is always up.

You'll notice that at the top of the status table, there is a time stamp. This means that the statuses that you see are not really live. They are simply a snapshot of the statuses as of that date and time. This is probably the only caveat to setting it up the way I did. I could easily run it off a web server at home, or even use HomeSeer's built-in web server, but I just don't want to; I do too much testing and rebooting, etc. to the point where the status site would not always be up. So this is the way I chose to do it.

To set this up, I wrote a script (VB Script) that runs twice every hour in HomeSeer. This script saves the names and statuses of all my devices to a simple text file on my PC. The text file has one line for each device, and each line contains several tab-delimited fields of info about that device.

The next step is to get that status data from my PC to this web site. For that, I scheduled a task that also runs right after the above script. This task uses WS_FTP Pro to upload the status text file to this web site. It's all automatic.

Following is a link to the current data that was recently uploaded:

The data in the above file is the actual current data that drives my status table. Then, I have a Perl CGI script that reads this text file, and displays the page you see.

For some of you, the explanation above may be enough. For others, you may want to see examples of the VB Script and Perl scripts that I wrote. For now, I can't show those to you. I use some proprietary libraries that I wrote and it would take some time to make them generic enough to show you. I still may do that at some point in the future. We'll see.