Netvibes now supports dynamic themes
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!
Netvibes, a 
July 28th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Interesting feature! Hope to see more themes that use it.
July 29th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
[...] been a month since we revealed that Netvibes is supporting dynamic themes – that is, themes that change throughout the day, depending on the designer’s [...]