Today, May 1st, is RSS Awareness Day. To celebrate, we've very happy to announce enhancements to our RSS-powered widget, the Blidget. Each improvement has been based on the feedback you've provided to us. Enjoy!
Custom Sizes
You can now make a Blidget as wide and tall as you want. Click the new custom size icon when you make or get a Blidget. Then, just tell us how big (or small) you want the Blidget to be.
Header: Image and Text Alignment
The image and text that appears at the top of your Blidget can now be center or right aligned. Of course if you want the text and image left aligned, we've kept that option too.
New Themes: Transparent, Red, Leopard or Your Own!
We've added four new options to the Blidget theme selector.
Transparent
Pick the new transparent theme if you want a Blidget that blends in with your page's background.
Red and Leopard Print
Two new HOT options! Give each a try.
Custom Color
The new color picker is easy to use and will help you find the perfect tint for your Blidget. Power-blue, anyone?
Update Your Existing Blidget. Make a New One!
If you have an existing Blidget, you can immediately apply these enhancements to them. Visit My Widgetbox and you can modify any Blidget you've created or added to a page.
If you haven't made a Blidget, you do realize it's RSS Awareness Day don't you?!? Make a Blidget and join in the celebration!
... And we have a feeling that bloggers, Twitter-ers, Stumblers, and other web 2.0 users will be equally excited!
The widget is completely configurable and works perfectly in your blog's sidebar as a promotional tool and traffic driver (similar to the popular blog badge!)… Or you can configure your ">SocialFeed to showcase content from your friends or favorite users. Here's how it works:
Configurations
- set the widget’s size
- choose the theme (currently 6 available)
- select your web 2.0 sites and input your username (Flickr, Last.fm, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, Digg and Delicious)
- set your font size and feed size
- input your widget’s header and name
Last week Widgetbox participated in two great events. For those of you who made it to the Web 2.0 Expo at the Moscone Center, you may have noticed a very crowded booth in a corner of the Expo floor. That booth was Zude, and they did a truly amazing thing and asked Widgebox and Myxer to join them in their booth to demonstrate our respective partnerships. It was great, and we had such a fun time getting to know the Rockstar Zude team!!
We are working with Zude on a remote gallery so that they can provide all our 55,000 widgets (we has widgets!) to Zude users. Got a network you want a remote gallery for? Let us know - Shawn can set you up with one - they're hoTTT.
Matt Wulkan, Zuder Extraordinaire, took some awesome pictures at the show. Zude had a green screen set up so they could demonstrate how easy it is to import all kinds of content into your Zude pages - below are some of those shots as well as some general pics of the expo.
If you want to learn more about Zude, check out some of their coverage from the Expo on PR 2.0 and Scobleizer
And speaking of pictures, the other super fun thing we did at Widgetbox last week was our monthly Hack Day. Will Price, our new CEO, made this killer Flickr widget for his Hack Day project. It's pretty sweet - you can put in any Flickr ID, and you have an awesome slide show to take with you on the web!
I used Will's widget for the two slideshows in this post. The one below has some shots of Hack Day, as well as our Friday night excursion to Pier 23. I have no idea why we are all wearing hats - they just appeared on our table, so what else were we supposed to do?
Who needs an SDK for iPhone widgets anyway?? Not Widgetbox! That's right, folks, check out our awesome new iPhone gallery and grab some widgets for your very own iPhone homescreen.
Check it out - you can get Fake Steve Jobs right on your homescreen (or of course you can grab his widget and put it anywhere you want), so you never have to be without him again.
Don't have an iPhone? (um, are you CRAZY??) Well, here's how it works. You can also check out this super neat site we found - iphonetester.com to see how it looks. Just be sure to use Safari for the best Apple-y experience.
Oh, and don't worry - I don't have an iPhone either...
If you haven't checked it out already, take a look at the new Widgetbox site! We're super fired up about it.
As you can see, we've relaunched both our homepage and our gallery to make it much, much easier for people to browse our huge inventory, and find the widgets they are looking for (and even some widgets they didn't know they were looking for!)
This is not only exciting, but necessary. You may have noticed that we now have over 50,000 widgets in our gallery. That's a whole lotta widgets!! We're really happy to be able to make it much easier to find each and every one of those widgets in the largest web widget gallery around.
Some of the cool new features to check out are:
More widgets are surfaced on our homepage. We've introduced some new showcases for widgets, including "Hottest Widgets" (complete with fire-y ratings), "New and Notable Widgets," and "Hidden Gems." Try 'em out and let us know what you think!
We've given you more categories to help you define your searches - check out our new tag browsing
And we've given you more and easier ways to sort your results. You can easily choose from "Hot Right Now," "Newest," "Top Rated," and "Most Popular."
Our goal in these new features was to present a greater selection of widgets to our users, and more turnover in the widgets we are highlighting - we want to give every widget in our gallery time in the spotlight!
We'll be doing lots of testing of our new site, and adding more cool features in the coming weeks and months. Be sure to check it all out and let us know what you think.
It's an amazingly warm Friday afternoon here in San Francisco. My friends and I haven't figured out where we'll meet for after-work drinks and dinner, but we'll use Yelp to find the answer.
But wait, what if you're not in San Francisco? Let our location-aware Yelp Search widget find you! This widget's map automatically centers on your location using a computer IP address to location lookup database.
We quickly put this widget together using the Yelp API, sample code provided by Yelp and MaxMind's GeoIP Javascript web service.
Example code is fantastic. Think of it as a code template. By adding your own customizations, you can turn that plain-jane sample into a great widget. Here's what we did:
1. Yelp for Developers
Yelp has a dedicated Yelp for Developers website. We read the docs, signed up for a free API key and downloaded the Google Maps code example.
2. MaxMind: GeoIP Javascript Web Service
MaxMind's GeoIP Javascript Web Service provides the latitude and longitude associated with the network a user's computer is on. By including a little bit of Javascript, we added this service into the Yelp Widget.
3. Make a New Widget
The Widgetbox Make a New Widget start page allowed us to create an HTML/JS widget using the Google Maps example we downloaded earlier from Yelp.
We entered the Google Maps HTML code into the Widget Code Editor, added Widget Settings that let users to customize the look and feel, and integrated both with the GeoIP Web Service Javascript code.
HTML/JS
widgets are a great option if you don't want to deal with the fuss
of finding a hosting provider. We host the code for you and provide you a great IDE-like environment to work in.
4. Share!
Submitting a new widget to the Widgetbox gallery allows you to share it with millions of people looking for web widgets. We just did it ... and so should you!
We are very excited about Sony Pictures new movie Quarantine - a star-studded thriller that hits theaters on October 17th... And we think that you'll be equally excited about their new, interactive widget "ContainTheTruth.com."
The widget features Quarantine's trailer and a gallery of first look photos from the film.
Did I mention that there is also a Quarantine sweepstakes from Sony? You can learn more from ContainTheTruth.com or directly in the widget. The sweepstakes begins tonight (4/10/2008) at 7:00pm pst. Good luck!
About Quarantine (from IMDB)
Television reporter Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter) and her cameraman (Steve Harris) are assigned to spend the night shift with a Los Angeles Fire Station. After a routine 911 call takes them to a small apartment building, they find police officers already on the scene in response to blood curdling screams coming from one of the apartment units. They soon learn that a woman living in the building has been infected by something unknown. After a few of the residents are viciously attacked, they try to escape with the news crew in tow, only to find that the CDC has quarantined the building. Phones, internet, televisions and cell phone access have been cut-off, and officials are not relaying information to those locked inside. When the quarantine is finally lifted, the only evidence of what took place is the news crews videotape.
Starring: Johnathon Schaech, Jennifer Carpenter, Columbus Short, Marin Hinkle and Jay Hernandez
Forbes.com just released another super cool widget. It's a personalizable stock watch list widget . Select all the stocks you watch including those on the AMEX, NASDAQ, and NYSE and get this widget for your site. It updates every minute with the most recent stock activity and you can share your watch list with anyone you want.
Find other widgets from Forbes.com and stay on top of the latest breaking news in business, technology, entrepreneurship, and more.
We got this new weather widget in the other day from magmata, and it is super slick. Totally useful, really configurable, and sexy to boot! Get it now and never wonder what the weather is anywhere in the US ever again.
Wordpress is a very popular blogging platform and one of the largest online communities of bloggers and developers. This past week, Wordpress.org released WordPress 2.5 and it rocks! (You can see a demo here)
Considering WordPress' growth and success, it makes sense that WordPress widgets are among the popular on Widgetbox. So whether you are new to Wordpress and blogging or are already an avid blogger - here are some of the top WordPress Widgets on Widgetbox:
Stay abreast of WordPress news and the latest WordPress themes / plugins:
If you use Wordpress.com (different than WordPress.org), you can show off your blogging timeline:
Of course, you can turn your blog into your very own widget with the Widgetbox Blidget - no coding needed! Just enter the URL of your blog or RSS feed. You can then customize the blidget, add it to your blog's template and watch your traffic grow!
Here is an example of what this blog looks like after it's been 'widgetized' using the Blidget:
Today, May 1st, is RSS Awareness Day. To celebrate, we've very happy to announce enhancements to our RSS-powered widget, the Blidget. Each improvement has been based on the feedback you've provided to us. Enjoy!
