netvibes - (re)mix the web

Back in september 2008, we introduced a way for users to make their own theme, through a Theme API built to be compatible with iGoogle’s. At that time, we wrote that while we supported most of the features of the original format (and a few of our own), we couldn’t technically support dynamic themes. We’re happy to annonce that the issue has now been solved!

Dynamic themes are themes that evolve according to the time of day. Provided the theme designer has built his theme conscienciously, a visitor to your public page would not see the same theme in the morning, in the afternoon or in the evening.

This can make for some very creative and inventive use of a theme! You can now express the whole spectrum of your personality through your public page’s theme.

How it works

In your themes, all you have to do is create more than one <ConfigMap type=”skin”> and indicate the time the skin must be displayed at. To do so, add the following tag: <Trait name=”TimeOfDay”>1am-2am</Trait> in yout ConfigMap.

You should end up with something like this:

<ConfigMaps>
  <ConfigMap type="skin">
    <Trait name="TimeOfDay">12am-12pm</Trait>
    ...
  </ConfigMap>
  <ConfigMap type="skin">
    <Trait name="TimeOfDay">1pm-12am</Trait>
    ...
  </ConfigMap>
</ConfigMaps>

Make sure that your timestamps cover the whole day. You can make your life easy by having just two themes (12am-12pm and 1pm-12am), or go crazy and make a specific theme for each hour (12am-1am, 1am-2am, etc.)! Don’t be afraid about using too many images: only the currently dispayed image is loaded.

We’re looking forward to improve the syntax. Help us build a better theme format by sending your feedback!

Having a widget format that can be exported to any of the major widget platform sure helps adoption of our massive collection of widgets. UWA adoption is even further helped when developers implement one of the supported format into their own project.

UWA widgets at work

That’s exactly what happened last month with Kludgets. Kludgets (short for “Klumsy, Lame, Ugly, Dumb, but Good Enough” ) is a new, open-source and multiplatform (Windows and Linux) widget engine, which aim is to become a best-of-breed widget engine, taking inspiration from the best features of other platforms.

As such, its widget format is a clone of the Apple Dashboard’s. And since UWA widgets can be exported to the Dashboard format, it was only a matter of time before the Kudgets developer took advantage of it! As they write in their blog, it only takes a handful of steps to get any UWA widget from Ecosystem to work on this new engine.

We’re really happy to see further proof that the UWA format’s versatility can be once more proven by this open-source project, and we wish it a swift and successful version 1.0!

Now, if they could directly implement the UWA format itself (either using the UWA specification or the LGPLv3 Exposition project), that’d be neat!

Publication stopped on this blog a (too long) while ago, without further ado. In the same manner, it’s back again!

Well, ado there needs to be: let it be known, good people and dearest subscribers, that my time away from the blog has not been in vain, only that I was diverted by other projects which needed my full attention. Even better, the latest of these time-consuming project has even been recently launched: French users of Netvibes can now profit (literally!) from a fully-featured Cashback widget – in the conception of which I had a not-too-small part

Anyway, the Netvibes DevNet blog is now back on tracks, and to make up for the lost time, here are a couple not-so-random facts that popped on our screens during the hiatus, and that we thought you might be interested in. In fact, far from being random, they are both tied to UWA one way or another. Neato!

UWA widget for WordPress!

Now that the major components of UWA have been released as open-source on Netvibes.org (as well as the UWA specification), it was just a matter of time before some talented coder got hold of them to add UWA-capability to a project. Turns out the talent came from none other than François Hodierne,  a former member of the Netvibes team and the man behind the h6e moniker!

The UWA Widgets plugin, which hecreated and released back in January, is a WordPress plugin which lets you add UWA widgets on your WordPress dashboard. Simple as that.

What that means is that you can improve the overly dull defaults blocks of WordPress’ dashboard, by mixingsome fun or useful widgets in.

Installing a widget is very easy, once you have a UWA widget’s source URL. The plugin adds a ‘Manage Widget’ section in the ‘Settings’ menu. Click it, and a quick interface reveals itself: a list of the installed widgets (with a remove button in case you need it), and simple form to add new widget.
Copy-paste the new widget’s source URL in that form, validate, and from now on the dashboard will display it along with the other components. You can edit the widget just as you would on Netvibes or the Apple Dashboard: by clicking the ‘Configure’ button that appears at the top-right of the block…

The WordPress dashboard with the Twitter, i-Metro and Gaping Void UWA widgets

You can get this nifty plugin from the WordPress.org Extend section, or directly from WordPress’ internal plugins installer (if you use WP 2.7+).

Note: the UWA technology relies on the Zend Framework. Hence, François have created a separate Zend Framework plugin for WordPress, which you should install and activate before activating the UWA Widgets plugin.

UWA cheat-sheet in Russian!

Our friends at Rambler.ru, who’s own personnalized startpage uses the Netvibes technology, have been kind enough to make a russian translation of the UWA cheat-sheet, and share it with us. You download it here, as with the English and French version!

If you happen to be interested in translating the cheat-sheet into your own language, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Last year, we introduced social features with the “Ginger” version of Netvibes. One of them, is the ability for users to share their most interesting links with your all their contacts. Since the launch of the feature, several hundred thousand links have already been publicly shared.
If you’re running a website, you can get your users to easily share your links with their contacts. All you have to do, is build a link with up to 3 GET parameters.

Here is a sample link: http://www.netvibes.com/share?title=Netvibes%20is%20awesome!&url=http%3A//www.netvibes.com/

The resource http://www.netvibes.com/share accepts the following parameters:

• title : Title for the shared link (my be URL-encoded);
• url : The link itself (must be URL-encoded);
• autoclose : Set it to 1 if you want the popup window to close after submission.

To URL-encode your links, you can use the function urlencode in PHP or encodeURIComponent in Javascript.

We tried to make it easy for anyone to integrate those links in any page by keeping it very simple. However, if you’re looking for turnkey solutions, some universal sharing buttons have already integrated Netvibes and you may use one of them.

It’s been a while since we gave you on update on UWA itself. You might think we either have too few to report, or would rather keep things under the radar until it’s the right time to talk about it. It’s actually much simpler: we’ve been busy.

Busy with improving your experience with UWA, that is! While you might not jump to the eyes, some of our recent efforts have been centered around giving both users and developers a stronger UWA. We did this by working at improving two critical components of a widget developer’s life: the UWA code itself, and its documentation.

Better, Faster, Stronger… and not Harder

For the last few weeks, our developers have been steadily rewiring the internal compilers for most of the supported platforms, bringing the UWA Environment at top speed, and making room for further improvements. This all happened behind the scene, but the upgrade to the compilers (iGoogle, Opera, Apple Dashboard, Live.com, etc.) should improve your every day use of UWA widgets.

Aditionnally, we used these updates to normalize behaviors across the different platforms, and incorporate a bottom status bar to maximize the spread of your widgets. Every newly-exported widget from Ecosystem will feature this bar, which we hope will help your widget reach more people.

See for instance the Web Radio Player widget, as displayed on Apple Dashboard, iGoogle, Opera and with the export tool :

As you can see, they all share the same Share button at the bottom of the widget. This is not in place in the Vista/Live.com export for now.

Also, note that all changes made to UWA are regularly backported to the open-source Exposition Widget Server.

…and easier on the eyes too!

Let’s face it, the DevNet used to be a mess of intertwined pages. That alone was bound to lose the reader’s patience, but the fact that over the years more technologies other than UWA kept being added to the documentation site (REST API, Ecosystem API, Theme format…), made for a much-needed revamping of the homepage, as well as a reorganization of all pages and a trimming of the unneeded ones.

That means a few important changes in the documentation URLs. All the documentation used to be located under http://dev.netvibes.com/doc/, but the coming of non-UWA-related docs urged us to gave each of them its own directory, as it should. There are now 3 mains sub-directories:

• http://dev.netvibes.com/doc/uwa/ : all there is to know about UWA, the Universal Widget API;
• http://dev.netvibes.com/doc/api/ : for some of Netvibes’ other APIs;
• http://dev.netvibes.com/doc/theme/ : for our Theme file format.

All the previously available docs have been moved to their respective directories. This would mean URL breakage, but we paid attention to make sure old URL would automatically redirect to the news ones. That being said, if you stumble upon any remaining ones, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Likewise, some pages of documentation have been deleted, some others created, some renamed for clarity, and most have been rewritten at least in part in order to take into account two years of UWA discussions on the forum. We’re still working on a brand new FAQ as of this typing, but all other page should be clearer yet.

Anyway, as the old song goes: “you have to admit, it’s getting better, a little better all the time”

This is year is coming to an end, parties are being planned already, and it might be time to look back at what 2008 brought us – and by us, I mean UWA and its ecosystem.

2008 has been a good year: we’ve released some very cool stuffs, added some functionalities to the API, and made the code sturdier. Let’s bring on The List:

• Netvibes saw a major release, named Ginger, which quite simply overhauled everything, from code to design. UWA also benefited from this with some niceties (such as rich-icon, widget.readOnly and widget.addStar) and consequently the MiniAPI finally got put to rest.
• Our dear DevNet site got a cool new design, and the UWA Cheat-Sheet got finalized in a lovely printable form, as a companion to the one-page documentation.
• In May, we celebrated the first birthday of UWA late, with a Developer Conference where we released…
  netvibes.org: the central repository for all our open-source projects, with a proper bug-tracking tool ;
  Netvibes Platform: open-sourced UWA components, such as UWA JavaScript Runtime (to run UWA widgets), PHP Exposition libraries (to parse and compile UWA widgets) and Exposition widget server (to serve widgets to users) ;
  Full in-code documentation for all the above projects ;
  The UWA-iframe method.
• To polish our opening of UWA, we published the first working draft of the UWA specification, for everyone to implement our widget API freely ;
• Since september, designer can create their own theme for Netvibes, through an XML format ;
• Ecosystem saw the addition of a full-blown widget creator, which eases the creation of widgets based on multiple feeds ;
• And finally, as if all this wasn’t enough, we released a preview of our support for the OpenSocial API, allowing widget developers to not only have universal widget, but social too (provide the platform support OpenSocial).

All in all, this has been a very productive year, and we hope you’ve been happy with the direction we gave to UWA. Be sure that more evolution is being prepared for 2009!

Have some excellent NYE parties, everyone, and as the saying goes, “see you next year!”

We’ve been waiting a long time to unveil this new improvement to our widget platform, and this week’s edition of the LeWeb conference in Paris was the perfect occasion to release a handful of good news concerning Netvibes, including this little nugget:

UWA developers can now make their widgets social through the powers of the OpenSocial API.

At the moment, we’re still in Public Preview mode – which means that it is not yet available on the main Netvibes site, and instead requires you to open an account in our sandbox site. It will allow you to test a few socials ideas with your widgets, until the official unveiling…

In order to test your OpenSocial-using UWA widgets, simply add the “UWA+OpenSocial” widget from the Essential Widgets list, and put your widget’s URL in its Edit section…

Because OpenSocial has its own website (and follows its own evolution path), our documentation on the subject is quite minimal: just the UWA basics you need to remember, the biggest part of the knowledge being on the OpenSocial site.

—

In addition to making UWA more powerful thanks to OpenSocial, Netvibes is now supporting the Google Gadget format. Again, this is still a Public Preview available only from the sandbox site (through the “Google Gadget” module). We’ll keep you informed on the evolution of that support soon…

(english version follows)

L’année dernière, j’ai eu le plaisir d’animer un atelier sur UWA durant la dernière journée de Paris-Web, la meilleure conférence française sur les standards, l’accessibilité, les meilleures pratiques et la quality du développement web. Vous pouvez retrouver la présentation, la cheat-sheet et les photos sur cet article. L’équipe Paris-Web remet le couvert cette année, et l’évènement se déroule la semaine prochaine, du 13 au 15 novembre.

Faire un atelier n’est pas prévu pour cette année, mais j’y serai néanmoins présent pendant les deux premiers jours pour faire la promotion de notre plate-forme, distribuer des cheat-sheets et stickers à qui-veut, et répondre aux questions des intéressés.

Rendez-vous la semaine prochaine !

—

Last year, I had the pleasure to run a UWA workshop during the final day of Paris-Web, France’s best conference on standards, accessibility, best practices and quality in web-development. You can find slides, cheatsheet and pictures on this post. The Paris-Web crew is at it again this year, and the event will run next, from the 13th to the 15th of November.

While running another workshop is not on our slate this year, I will attend the conference during its first two days, in order to promote our platform, give away cheatsheets and stickers to those in dire need, and answer questions from the widget-eager crowd.

Let’s meet next week!

We’ve made a few adjustments to Netvibes Ecosystem this week, mostly centered around the header section:

• First, a new, bigger search box
• Second, a whole new tool for creating widgets out of multiple feeds : the Widget Editor

Embiggen your search with an over-cromulent form!

The point of having an improved search form seems evident: rather than throwing popular or featured widget at the visitor’s face, with search as a side dish, we wanted to get the user in command of the Ecosystem, and let him decide what’s best for him, through searches.

That being said, the home page steal features the three classic, ever-useful sorting tabs: Featured widgets, Most popular widgets and Just arrived. More power to you!

Easily build a multiple-feed widget!

But the real deal behind this new improvement of Ecosystem is a second green button in the top bar, next to the usual “Submit widget” button – which lets you send our way your content (in the form of a UWA widget, a Flash file or an iCal file) to automatically register them into Ecosystem as widgets.

That second button is called “Create widget”, and is the result of an evolution of UWA feed widgets: the multifeed widget, and the tool to easily make some.

Once you click on that button, you’re taken to an options screen:

• On the left, a link to an old friend: the tool to create a widget out of any type of feed (RSS, Atom, RDF…) ;
• On the left, a link to the new tool, code-named ”Miso”, which is a whole new way of creating advanced feed-based widgets altogether.

The Multifeed Editor is very easy to understand, even more so if you’ve already used the Feed Editor. On the right is a preview of your widget, updated as soon as you change any value on the left. That left section is where you’ll decide how many feeds you want to put into that widget, and what you would like the widget’s header to look like: a simple colored background, or an image that you designed, complete with a cool background and your logo?

If you choose to upload your own image, the Multifeed Editor will let you crop it in order to fit the recommended 350*100 size: select the portion of the image (click the selector borders, or drag the selector around), and you will immediately see live how it turns out in your widget. Until you have validated the whole thing, cropping is non-destructive, and you can try it out as often as needed, until you find the perfect match. You might also want to choose a background color that fits with the image…

So there you go, folks: better tools for easy widget creation, and bigger search for easy widget findability.

Hope you will enjoy it! Let a thousand multifeed widgets bloom!

Good news for Netvibes users: they now have a hundred more themes to choose from when deciding on their pages appearance. And this good news comes along with a probably even better one for both designers and developers: you can create your own Netvibes themes, and import themes from other theme-creators. This means that the Netvibes interface is now open to a lot more creativity.

It’s been a long while since we wanted to bring such freedom to the creativity of our users, and in the end we decided to use a theme format that would be compatible with iGoogle’s Theme API. You can already dive in our theme design documentation!

So build away! The file format uses XML, and it’s easy to build a theme, using images and a few simple rules. Once you design is done, put all the files online, and to use the design on a Netvibes page, just call it using this URL: http://www.netvibes.com/?theme=[absolute URL of theme's XML file]

Technical details

These themes are applied on internal theme framework, with some CSS rules that cannot be over-ridden – so you won’t be able to move the tabs to the left column for now, for instance – but you can use the existing gadget_area.tab.* value to style the tabs the way you want.

Your design choices will apply upon this basic framework, just as it does in iGoogle. We do support the same mutliple-layers approach, and could even support dynamic theme (the <Trait>  tag), if it were not for a CDN issue that we plan on fixing.

Parting words

This is just the very first step in a project that we intend to build more and more, like tools and directories. And this is where users are taking part: let us know what kind of customiztion you want to see, and we’ll do our best to improve our support for this Theme API, even by extending the original XML format.

That’s why the DevNet forum now features a dedicated forum for Themes development. Give us your feedback, and let’s work together in improving this great feature!