How to Set up a Webcam Web Page
Webcams are one of the oldest tricks on the Internet. The first webcam was pointed at the Trojan room coffee pot in the computer science department of Cambridge University. This webcam is now defunct, as it was finally switched off on 22 August 2001. The final image captured by the camera can still be viewed at the webcam’s homepage
If you want to set up a Web cam of your own, you’ll need to get a camera and some software. You can use any type of camera you would like.
Most of the cameras you buy on the market right now come with webcam software, but if they don’t you’ll need to get software that will both capture the picture and FTP it to your Web site. The Internet Conferencing site has many other lists of Webcam software.
Setting Up the Page
Many people, when they decide to build a Webcam, focus all their time and energy on getting the camera and the software. But the Web page it’s on is nearly as important. If you don’t have certain things set correctly, your webcam can become a “webcan’t”.
First there’s the image. Make sure:
The image should have a generic filename – no timestamps – I recommend something like webcam.jpg
Know what size image your camera snaps, and use that in the HTML. Don’t resize your camera images with the HTML – they are usually fairly grainy and hard to view in the best of times.
Check your FTP settings and know where the image will be uploaded to.
Write your image tag, the way you would any valid XHTML image tag. Include height and width and don’t forget the alt text:
<img src=”webcam.jpg” width=”200″ height=”200″ border=”0″ alt=”my cam pic” />
Then there’s the Web page itself. Your page should automatically reload and it should not be cached. This will insure that your cam viewers get a new image every time. Here’s how you do that:
In the <head> of your HTML document, place the following two lines:
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”30″ />
<meta http-equiv=”expires” content=”0″ />
In the refresh meta tag, if you want your page to refresh less often than every 30 seconds, change the content=”30″ to something other than 30 – 60 (1 minute), 300 (5 minutes), etc. The expires tag is important because it affects the cache of Web browsers, so that the page is not cached but rather pulled from the server on every load.
Few examples of live webcams from all around de world: http://www.abcwebcam.com