jarsite

jarsite is free windows program that can easily take your mobile phone games and turn them into a game download website. jarsite takes your games and extracts information from them to generate an entire community website with thousands of pages of content in just seconds!

To see an example of a website generated with jarsite take a look at Blimp.Mobile, the jarsite demo website. The exact look of websites generated with jarsite can vary vastly and it is entirely up to you to decide how your webiste will look. Notice the blank spaces on the blimpmobile site represent space which can be used for advertising, related content, or anything else you desire.

The default website created by jarsite is designed to be the highest performance possible with the lowest server requirements. This combination makes jarsite ideal for a shared hosting environment ensuring low running costs to build a better ROI.

jarsite Requirements:

Windows 2000 or higher
knowledge of command line interface
knowledge of basic HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc
webserver with rsync, PHP with GD and mod_rewrite
game collection to generate website

jarsite Features:

High performance website generated that serves uncompressed pages or pages with level 9 compression using advanced content caching ensuring page serving times are minimal
Captcha protected game downloads to stop people scraping your site
Automatic duplicate game detection ensuring every game on your website is unique
Unique page for each game including a space for description and comments from the community
Mobile phone browser compatible for a consistent experience on PC or mobile
Updates section showing the most recently added games
Default template optimised for search engines and Ad placement
Very low maintence. Fire and forget style

Using jarsite

To use jarsite you simply run the program from within a directory which will be a local mirror of a remote users home directory on your web server. To begin simple create an empty database:

C:\jarsite\web_home>..\jarsite -c YES
New database generated

Next, add your game collection to your jarsite database without generating the website pages like so:

C:\jarsite\web_home>..\jarsite -x c:\jarsite\jars\
Adding 1 - "Game 1" to database - "game1.jar"
Adding 2 - "PuzzleGame" to database - "puzzle_game_k700.jar"
Adding 3 - "ActionGame" to database - "actgame_sx1.jar"
Adding 4 - "RPGGame" to database - "rpg1.0.jar"

Notice the trailing "\" on the directory given to jarsite. Jarsite will scan the directory you give it including subdirectories and add any jar file it finds that is not already in the database. This can lead to no new additions if there are no new games so it is safe to run jarsite over a directory that may contain duplicate games or ones that are already in your database.

Now you need to tell jarsite that you are ready to push your website to your webserver. Do this by issuing a website update:

C:\jarsite\web_home>..\jarsite -u
Update detailes entered

Issuing the update command lets jarsite know that you will not be adding any more games to your site today and records the current details for the site updates page. The first time you do this will appear to have no effect since it simply sets the update details to include all games currently in the database and not generate an update report. Next time you add games to your website and issue an update command, the updates section of your website will include a page listing all the games added since the last time you issued an update. You should only ever issued an update once per day at most since update page URLs use dates.

Now that you have your game database filled and have issued an update you can generate your website with the following command:

C:\jarsite\web_home>..\jarsite -s ..\generate.lua .
Generating pages
Generating index pages
Generating update pages
Generating alphabet pages
Generating game pages

You website is now ready to upload to your webhost using the provided rsync script or over any other file transfer protocol. We recommend using rsync since it will only transfer newer files thus making updating you website a quick easy job.

Before your website will function you need to generate the following directories if they do not exist and make sure they are writable by the webserver.

~/cache
~/cache/0
~/cache/A
~/cache/B
~/cache/C
~/cache/D
~/cache/E
~/cache/F
~/cache/G
~/cache/H
~/cache/I
~/cache/J
~/cache/K
~/cache/L
~/cache/M
~/cache/N
~/cache/O
~/cache/P
~/cache/Q
~/cache/R
~/cache/S
~/cache/T
~/cache/U
~/cache/V
~/cache/W
~/cache/X
~/cache/Y
~/cache/Z
~/generated
~/generated/0
~/generated/A
~/generated/B
~/generated/C
~/generated/D
~/generated/E
~/generated/F
~/generated/G
~/generated/H
~/generated/I
~/generated/J
~/generated/K
~/generated/L
~/generated/M
~/generated/N
~/generated/O
~/generated/P
~/generated/Q
~/generated/R
~/generated/S
~/generated/T
~/generated/U
~/generated/V
~/generated/W
~/generated/X
~/generated/Y
~/generated/Z
~/newjars

Customizing your website

The files in the base and web_home directories contain html templates, javascript files, and CSS files which can be customized to change the appearence and operation of your website. The files are as follows:

base/index.html: The index page template for your website
base/game.html: The game page template for your website. Each game will have one of these with links to download the game, information about the game, an icon, and so on
base/game-alphabet.html: The idirectory alphabet page template for your website. This template will be used to generate pages listing games sorted alphabetically.
base/game-alphabet-entry.html: The template used to generate a single game link on an alphabet page.
base/games.html: The template for your game directory including links to all the alphabet pages.
base/update.html: The update page template for listing newly added games to your website
web_home/s.css: The CSS file used by your website for when a PC browser is used
web_home/m.css: The CSS file used by your website for when a Mobile Phone browser is used
web_home/jad.png: JAD file icon
web_home/jar.png: JAR file icon
web_home/favico.ico: website icon

Other files exist in the web_home directory which provide graphics and functionality all of which are customizable but may require some technical knowledge to achieve a significant result.

All templates contain tags which are filled in by jarsite, and some which are later filled in by your webserver. These tags allow you to arrange the content as you see best and to give some dynamic content to your pages.

Since this is an easly version of jarsite, the best place to see how it works is to visit Blimp.Mobile and compare template files to see which parts of the templates generate which parts of the website. For technical support, please ask your question in the jarsite forum.

Download

The latest version of jarsite is v1.0

Download jarsite

To use this program you must have the following parts included in every webpage generated:

<meta name="generator" content="jarsite"/> In each pages head section
A link to the jarsite webpage in the footer for each generated page