WEB Publish

WEB Publish is the process of displaying the on-going race on your web-page on the internet, either in real time as “LiveTiming”, or just to publish the final race results and statistics. This can be done manually or fully automated from LapMaster.

WEB Publish mode (FTP server)

If you or your club have a web page on the Internet, it is almost certain that you have FTP access to the server that hosts your homepage.

If you provide the required FTP information to LapMaster, you will be able to do LiveTiming and upload statistics and results to your website.

In the Advanced (race) setup options there is an option called “Auto publish”.

This feature automatically post the race results and statistics to your website at end of race. It also creates and maintains an index page of these stats and results.
The index page itself can be found from a link provided on the “LiveTiming” page.

It is a prerequisite of the “Auto Publish” feature that you have supplied the FTP data and run the Setup Wizard on this Web Publish page.

Your website
This is the URL for your web-page. A sample could be www.LapMaster.dk.

FTP Logon

You must provide your FTP logon credential in order for LapMaster to be able to access your website.

FTP-Server – The name of the FTP-server associated with your web page. This name is provided to you by your internet provider.

UserID - Your userid for FTP logon. Provided by your internaet service provider.

Password - The password for the FTP logon provided to you by your internet provider.
The password is not displayed, but LapMaster remembers it and uses it for logon.

Caution: A malicious user of LapMaster might misuse this capability to damage your WEB-Site.
Use your common sense and your own judgement to determine if you want this feature to be available, and will trust LapMaster and its users, access to your website.

The password itself will not be readable by users of LapMaster.

As Filename - This indicates the filename your will be using for LiveTiming. It might contain subdirectory navigation.

Note: You will need to provide links from your existing pages to the new page for LiveTiming and statistics, for people to be able to navigate to it.

Result path - This indicates the path that will be used during upload of Result data. Remember this is relative to your FTP logon directory.

Statistics path - This indicates the path that will be used during upload of Statistics data. Remember this is relative to your FTP logon directory.

Note: As a special feature, if you provide a filename/Result-path/Statistics-path that starts with a drive letter specification (Like “C:\”), then the data will not be send by FTP, but stored locally with the specified path and filename. It will still be in the HTML format.

With the basic logon information, you can now use the “Save on WEB” buttons on the result page to publish the result at a simple click of a button.

FTP action

However you can do much more than manual upload. Actual you can display the running status in real time by using the “LiveTiming” capabilities.

Setup wizard:

Fill out all relevant boxes in this group, including deciding on the use of Web cams. Then click on the Setup Wizard, to generate all the required pages on your website to be able to display LiveTiming.

Several templates will be copied from “C:\LapMaster\Multimedia\Factoty” to “C:\LapMaster\Multimedia” if they are not there already. If you understand how to write HTML, you can modify these templates in the Multimedia folder to suit i.e. the style and colour of your website. Once that they are in the Multimedia folder they are “yours” and will not be updated by default when you install a new version of LapMaster. Do not modify the uploaded HTML on your website. It will be overwritten the next time you run the wizard or the Embed code update.

During the Setup Wizard you will be asked to paint a banner for your raceway using the standard program “Paint. You can include graphics from elsewhere, but you should not change the dimension of the banner model.

It is a prerequisite that you run the wizard before attempting to run LiveTiming.
Otherwise the expected pages and templates as well as directories will not be available and the LiveTiming will fail.

Factory Reset

If you want to take advantage of new LapMaster layout and functions, you can click on the “Factory Reset”. This will remove all the local HTML from the Multimedia folder (Including your local modifications), and revert back to copies of the templates from the Factory folder.

Note: This also remove access to your past race result and statistics. As the index for this is stored in the “C:\LapMaster\Results\LapMasterResultLink.htm” which is also reset. However, a backup is provided for your convenience.

PC-Web Sync

All the results and statistical data is first written to the local disk, then copied to your webserver. If you lose the internet connection while racing, you might get in a situation where you are missing files on the server.
You can use this button to synchronize what is on the PC and what is on your webserver.
Alternatively, if you change your physical PC, you can use this button to retrieve a copy of what is on the webserver in order to “Prime” the new PC with your historical data.

Automatic FTP to FTP Server: (LiveTiming)
By enabling this automatically update at regular intervals, you are able to provide “LiveTiming”. The current value of the Scoreboard is packaged into an HTML format and uploaded to the internet so that people can use a browser to follow your race. Special wizardry in the HTML allows the screen to update for your spectators without any human intervention.

You can select the upload interval of 2.5, 5(*), 10, 30, 60 or 120 seconds.
The 5 sec is the recommended default.
This will normally give the appearance of a “Live” update.

Webcam
Besides the data from LapMasters Scoreboard, you can mix your LiveTiming display with images from a webcam.

None

The option of “None” of cause means that you will not enhance the LiveTiming with any images.

Still/WebCam.jpg
Selecting this option makes LapMaster send the image contained in the file

“C:\LapMaster\MultiMedia\WebCam.jpg” to your LiveTiming display.
It will send this image at the interval selected in “Automatic FTP to FTP server”

You can use either a still image to show your racetrack in general, or you can use a 3’rd party software like “FWINK” to snap a webcam picture, say every 5 seconds to give an almost live action appearance.
However with the easy access to LiveStreaming video, this has become almost obsolete, unless you are on a very limited internet bandwidth.

Live Stream

Today LiveStream of video is easily available.

We started with “UStream”, but that is no longer a free service. In fact, it has become a little bit pricy, and not our first choice anymore.
Now we have YouTube, Facebook and Twitch that all allows you to do LiveStreaming for free. I am sure there are many more.

Note 1: It is worth noting that the LiveStreaming does not necessary have to be performed from the race computer. It might be an advantage NOT to run video from the race computer as not to put it in danger from crashing due to flaky video software or other issues.

Note2: Let me take this opportunity to point at the “Manycam” software. It can run in a limited free version or you might pay for the more powerful licensed version. At any rate it allows you to work with multiple webcams, do video overlays and a lot of fancy video stuff to give a super professional appearance to your webcast.

Live Stream Embed code:
Common to all of the stream providers are that you can get “Embed” code from their service to include on your own webpage. How you do this is a little different from each of them, and you will have to investigate that for the one you choose.
At any rate, paste the embed code into the “Live stream Embed code” field and click on the “Update LiveStream Embed code”. This will integrate the actual code in your LiveTiming display.
Some services (UStream and Twitch) allows you to have the same Embed code for all your broadcasts. Other (YouTube and Facebook) requires you to insert a particular Embed code after you have started your LiveStream.
However it is just a matter of pasting the Embed code and click Update.

The Embed code that you insert are modified, and will have the “width=” and “height=” parameters modified to suit the LapMaster LiveTiming screen layout. If you write your own HTML, and have a need to use a different layout, then change the values in the comment containing “video height=” and “video width=” inside “LiveTimingLoaderUStream.htm”. These are the values that will be used for overriding.

Chat Embed code:
The LiveTiming display also allows for you to include a chat-room for your spectators. This works the same way as the video Embed. You get an Embed code from your provider. UStream and Twtch both provides chatroom.
Paste the chatroom Embed code into the box, and click on the “Update Chat Embed code” to modify your website to include your selected chatroom.
Having a chatroom is optional.

The Embed code that you insert are modified, and will have the “width=” and “height=” parameters modified to suit the LapMaster LiveTiming screen layout. If you write your own HTML, and have a need to use a different layout, then change the values in the comment containing “chat height=” and “chat width=” inside “LiveTimingLoaderUStream.htm”. These are the values that will be used for overriding.

Comment:
Any text comment you want to be displayed together with the AUTO generated pages.

Edit today’s Racing program

This allows you to update a text that are available to the spectators.
It is very useful to provide an approximate timetable for when there will be action on the raceway.