Sharing (widgets) is caring
We’ve long said, and proved, that UWA works on all major widget platforms – you know the drill: Netvibes, Apple Dashboard, iGoogle, Opera, Vista, Live.com… But there is one more that deserves to be as well known: blog export.
The ability to work on blogs, and for that matter on any website, has always been part of UWA starting with the now-deprecated BlogWidget method. BlogWidget was a nice first try at including UWA widget within the premises of a website, but in the long run was a hassle to instal, and for us it quickly became hard to maintain.
UWA compilers have improved a lot since last year, and the release of the Ecosystem was for us a chance to push further the proverbial envelope of exporting UWA widgets. So we built UWA export right into Ecosystem, and called it Share.
Let’s say you like news so much, you want your website’s visitors to see our New-York Times widget in your sidebar. With the new Share tool, this previously laborious task has gotten very easy: go to the widget’s Ecosystem page, and click on the Share button, located next to the widget preview, right between the install links for the current 5 support platforms and the Source button, in all its orange glory.
Clicking that link brings you to a whole new tool in Ecosystem, where you can configure the look of the widget for better inclusion in your website. There, you can change the widget’s title, its height and the color of the header. While make these changes, you can see them live in the preview on the right side of this export tool, and can even update the height manually rather than using the counter.
Since exported widget do not offer an Edit section (by design), this tools lets you configure the widget’s preferences directly.
Once you are happy with the preview, you can directly grab the HTML code in the section below. As you can see it’s still pretty close to the old BlogWidget method, but believe me, it really has improved since that first version, the export tool being just the surface of it.
The most advanced among you might even find it cool to dabble with the code directly rather than through the interface…
Stick that in your website’s HTML code, at the right place, upload, reload, and you should new be the proud owner of a UWA widget on your website!
netvibes
September 16th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
[...] week’s post about the Share tool of Netvibes Ecosystem was a prelude to another internal code update, which bears explaining here in more [...]
September 1st, 2009 at 8:19 pm
I just can’t get this to work. I only get a blank page. Is there something wrong with this code:
PC Mag
<script
var BW = new UWA.BlogWidget({moduleUrl:’http://www.netvibes.com/modules/feedReader/feedReader.php?feedUrl=http%3A%2F%2Frssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com%2Fpcmag.xml’});
BW.setConfiguration({’title’:'PC Magazine’, ‘height’:197});
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Joe: it seems to be working just fine for me. Could you give me the URL of the page where you are testing this?
October 30th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
I am not able to copy the code please type it as a blockquote
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:28 am
Sam: you don’t have to type the code. Once your widget is referenced in Netvibes Ecosystem, you can simply go to its page, then click the Share button, and there is the code!