Once in a while it’s fun to do something a
little different with scripting. For example,
I created a HTML Application (HTA) that’s a
greeting card for the holiday season.
HolidayTree.hta uses basic timers with
randomized colors to produce a colorful
holiday tree with blinking multicolored
lights and a Happy Holidays greeting (see
Figure 1). You can find HolidayTree.hta in
the 100488.zip file by clicking the Download the Code
Here button, above. To “open” the card, simply
double-click the HolidayTree.hta file.
If desired, you can easily personalize the
greeting and change the color of the tree
lights and the background. To change the
greeting, open the file in Notepad and find
the code
<p align="center"><b>
<font size="7" color="#800000">
<span style="font-family: Brush
Script MT"> Happy Holidays</span>
</font></b></p>
Replace Happy Holidays with your
greeting.
To change the color of the tree lights or
background, you need hexadecimal color
codes. I included the AddColor.hta in the
100488.zip file for this purpose. In the Add-
Color.hta’s UI, click the Rainbow Chart
button to create a red-green-blue (RGB)
color chart in Microsoft Word. This chart
consists of 180 different colored cells. Inside
each cell is the RGB value that creates the
color. After you find the color you want, you
can convert the RGB number into the hex
code in AddColor.hta. (If you’d like more
information about AddColor.hta, see the
VIP exclusive article “Add a Little Color to
Your World” at windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/47800/add-a-little-color-to-your-world.html.)
After you have the hex codes for the
colors you want to use, plug your hex color
codes into HolidayTree.hta. The code
<body bgcolor="#008080">
sets the background color. The code
str = "#FF0000,#FFFF00,#FF00FF," & _
"#00FF00,#00FFFF,#0000FF,#ADFF2F"
str = str &
",#FF8C00,#FF1493,#FFCC00," & _
"#FFEFD5,#8B008B"
sets the color of the tree lights. Happy
holidays to you all!
—Jim Turner, domain administrator and applications
developer, Computer Sciences Corp.
See associated figure