Netvibes Developers blog

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!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.