Showing websites without internet

[rico]

As part of my business, i'm expanding into helping clients with a lot more than just hosting.

Basically, what i want to be able to do is to visit a client and show them some example websites made by the webdesigners i work with. They can then tell me what they like about different sites, and i can go away and make their site.

I want a way of showing websites on my laptop without being connected to the internet.

Which of these options would be best:

1) Make all the hyperlinks direct to a location on my HDD. so instead of www.riconian.com/images/pic.jpg it would point to C://mydocuments/images/pic.jpg as an example.

Problem with 1) is that ideally i just wanted to show the clients example websites that are already made, and with CSS, flash etc it becomes hard to show easily/edit the sites.

2) Somehow download a whole webpage and show offline? Is this possible?



I know that sounds a bit muddled, i hope it makes sense. Any ideas?

[ThatPhilBrettGuy]

Why not just run a webserver on the laptop, and serve the pages locally? That way all the CGI stuff can run as well (assuming you can run the same server that will host the pages in production).

[jgmadkit]

Install Foxserv on your laptop. This installs Apache, PHP and MySQL, no configuration necessary. Job done.

John

[JoolzB]

I'd prob go with the suggestion above(philbrett) I think, load IIS or PWS up. You may hit a few problems depending on how pages/CSS are referenced e.g.they may ref say a www site. You should be able to get round that tho.

>> Edited by JoolzB on Tuesday 8th February 21:01

[gopher]

I agree - just run IIS on your lap top - make sure all your css\script links are relative and you should not have any issues - same with db's have them installed locally if you need them.

edited to put back \

>> Edited by gopher on Tuesday 8th February 21:19

[chrisjl]

Any well coded site will be using relative links (e.g. images/file.jpg), rather than absolute (e.g. http :// www .site. com/ images/file.jpg), so there shouldn't be any editing required. Just copy it from whereever it's hosted into a folder on your laptop, then load the appropriate index.html (or whatever) and it should all display fine.
As long as there's no cgi involved, that should be all you need to do (if not, see Phil's suggestion - www.xitami.com has a simple to install web server).
If your webdesigners have used absolute links everywhere, give them a slap.

[rico]

Cool! Cheers guys. I'll follow these links and suggestions up tomorrow

[ThatPhilBrettGuy]

If it's a Mac laptop his www.machttp.org/index.php looks ok. I can't really comment on Mac web servers as the only thing my 5300 powerbook does is hold the spare room door open.

[BliarOut]

If you find out that you do need to run it as www.whatever without net access, (which you shouldn't) just put an entry in your hosts file fow www.whatever. Job done