Introduction

Over the past few days, I explored several tutorials for creating a launcher page for my home lab. From my novice perspective, many of the available options seemed unnecessarily complicated to install and use, especially for such a relatively simple purpose.

I found myself thinking, “It can’t be that complicated. Why not create my own?” As it turned out, the project was somewhat more complicated than I expected.

I no longer do much web development, and I realize that web technologies have changed considerably over the years. Based on my previous experience, however, I believed it should be possible to create a local dynamic webpage containing links to various network resources without requiring a web server.

As it turns out, it is possible—with a few caveats.

I did not want to hard-code the links directly into the webpage. Instead, I wanted the page to load them from a separate file. Unfortunately, modern web browsers handle local files differently than they did in the past. Browser security restrictions make it difficult for JavaScript to read local files without additional configuration or workarounds.

I will not describe every design change and compromise made during the project. To keep things as simple as possible, I will focus on the final design and the scripts used to make it work.

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