netvibes - (re)mix the web

This is a selection of articles that we think would be of most interest to fellow developers. Useful articles are regularly published, and disappearing from the front page does not make them less relevant. We feel they deserve to be kept above waters.

Tutorials

The documentation is not always easy to browse through. This blog serves as a way to point in a specific direction, without cluttering the documentation more than it needs…

UWA and JavaScript

Taking the time to get into more details for some of UWA’s functionalities…

• “New feature: BlogWidget export“: explains how to use display a UWA widget on a website/blog
• “Preview: the UWA cheat-sheet“: a handy PDF file that lists all of UWA’s methods
• “Use the Netvibes podcast player from your UWA widget“: explains how to use Netvibes’ internal audio player
• “Using JavaScript events handlers in UWA widgets“: quick dos and don’ts if JS event handling
• “Improving your tabs with UWA’s TabView options“: TabView controls tips & tricks
• “Introducing rich icons for UWA widgets“: bigger is better when displaying icons in some platforms
• “Use UTF-8 in your widgets and live happily ever after“: why you should forget about ISO-8859-1, HTML entities and “&”-codes, and rely entirely on UTF-8

General tips

Ideas and suggestions on how to live a widget life…

• “What’s new for UWA developers in the new Ecosystem?“: explains some of the functionalities of Ecosystem
• “Put a UWA widget around your Flash application“: using the Daft Punk Alive widget as an example, explains how to use Ecosystem to quickly create a Flash-containing widget
• “Local widgets: because your neighbor is probably a Netvibes user too“: why you should build local widgets

“Building a Twitter widget” series

Ongoing tutorial touching on many important subjects of UWA, such as Ajax requests and authentication… It’s the recommended starting point for this getting into UWA.

1. Setting-up the code and displaying a single status
2. Displaying the public timeline
3. Paging and automatic preferences
4. Getting your private data through authentication
5. Publishing data to your account through authentication

“Converting a MiniAPI module to a UWA widget” series

The MiniAPI has long been deprecated, but many module developers are lost when faced with the necessity to convert their code to UWA. This ongoing series should answer all their questions.
It’s also a good start for this who are just getting started with UWA.

1. Basic “Hello World” code
2. Preferences form, and how to access its values
3. Simple Ajax request: getting data
4. Advanced Ajax request: sending data
5. Paging and tabs
6. How to deal with Ecosystem and existing users

“Preparing for Ginger” series

Ginger, the new version of Netvibes, brings its share of new aspects to widgets development. This ongoing series lists them all…

1. Icons, end of MiniAPI, public widget
2. UWA Test module, inline error messages, MiniAPI & Universes

Interviews

Ask widget developers about their view of UWA and widget development in general…

• Ben Colon: first registered Ecosystem user, and author of many popular modules
• Patrice Bernard: author of the i-Métro widget, based on the online service of the same name
• Jeremy Selier: new-comer to widget-making, let’s see what he thinks of it!