I have taken up the banner of producing a portfolio for my web design/development group. This portfolio would be full screen on a nice flat panel TV and rotate through a list of our websites that we have built. That is really the only requirement - display our work on a big TV for people to oogle over when they enter our office. I have tried a few different approaches and have hit a wall on each of them so I am turning here for a little help.
While static screenshots would probably be the easiest way to get a portfolio up, it wouldnt do many of your websites justice which have video, motion graphics or other interactive features. Screenshots would also require also require a good deal of maintenance or else they would become outdated as the websites evolve.
So I turned to dynamically loading up a list of URLs. This solution seems to be the most scalable and accurate... if I could actually get it to work. I have done this with using JS to create iframes or using AJAX requests to grab HTML and inject it into the page. The problem with these approaches, along with a couple others I tried is that after a given period of time, the browser accumulates so much of the computer's memory that the browser crashes. This happens in Firefox, IE and Chrome.
Has anyone done this before? If so, how? I am very comfortable in .NET, IIS, HTML, JavaScript and am beginning to get a decent grasp on ActionScript 3, so ideas in those technologies are welcome.
As I am finishing up this post, it occured to me that I could try writing a .NET desktop app instead of a web page as I have been. Does anyone know if this would have a similar issue being a memory hog?
Create a webpage using frames. Use JavaScript to make the big, main frame go to the next website in your list every X seconds.