Archive for December, 2008
Shopping widget at Makeup Makes Me Happy
by chris on Dec.16, 2008, under Widget Sightings
Check out the 2008 Holiday Beauty Guide from Makeup Makes Me Happy – a great example of how someone can build a dynamic, interactive shopping experience with some widgets and feeds.
I count 4 widget from KickApps alone:
- The center of the page, with listings for various beauty products sorted by price, is all a giant shopping widget!
- The Twitter Lifecast widget shows Roselyn’s recent tweets, letting us know that she’s serious about makeup and active in the community.
- The Beauty Vision widget showcases the best video from MMMH, including product reviews.
- The Latest on the Message Boards widget shows recent posts from the MMMH message boards, where you can meet more people interested in beauty and makeup.
That shopping widget is really killer – elegantly integrated into the page design, it demonstrates that with widgets are more than blog eye candy and can provide useful features that might not otherwise be available on a website.
Facebook Friends Feed Widget
by chris on Dec.12, 2008, under Deathmatches, Widget Sightings
Danny’s warming up for Widget Death Match Round 2 with a few practice widgets, such as this Facebook widget that shows his friends feed:
Browse to Danny’s site to paste your own Facebook Friend Feed into the widget and click the “steal this” button to copy it onto your own blog.
Grossest widget ever (NSFW-ish)
by chris on Dec.12, 2008, under Deathmatches, Widget Sightings
On Wednesday, on his way home from work, Mike sliced his leg open on a fire hydrant in a freak accident. He came back to the office bandage the 4″ cut, then headed home to get stapled up in the ER, but not before he created this widget (warning: if you click the widget, you will see something very gross):
I guess this was a Mike vs. Fire Hydrant Death Match? If you can’t get enough of KickApps team injuries, check out Mike’s blog for more details, including a video of his wife seeing the cut for the first time. Her commentary is priceless.
Marissa Miller Harley Davidson Widget previews WDM Round 2
by chris on Dec.12, 2008, under Deathmatches
Widget Death Match Round 2 is scheduled for Tuesday, 12/16, and people are getting nervous. Just a quick reminder of how Mike won round 1: through the semi-legitimate practice of spamming the judges with multiple widget entries. As Mike said:
Will this one win? No? How about this one? Or this one?
Ethics aside, the Mike’s tactic makes sense. The KickApps Widget Studio allows Mike to crank out eye-popping Widgets in a few minutes, and he tipped the vote with this (eye-popping) Marissa Miller Harley Davidson Widget:
The clincher was his page that allows you to add any YouTube video to this widget, a great demonstration of widgets’ flexibility and opportunities for personalization.
Mike will be back for WDM Round 2, so stay posted for more Widget Death Grips!
Giving New York Times widgets a facelift
by chris on Dec.09, 2008, under Widget Sightings
We recently heard that customizable New York Times widgets that allow you to add news headlines to blogs and personal homepages such as iGoogle.
The NY Times’ simple widget builder interface offers some interesting features, such as:
- Options to browse popular content categories, such as Home Page or Business articles.
- A search feature for finding more specific categories.
- One-click tools for adding tabs to your NY Times widget.
- Options for showing headlines vs. blurbs and photos.
- One-click sharing options for Netvibes, Blogger, and Vox users (in addition to the aforementioned iGoogle), powered by Gigya.
On the downside, the widget isn’t too pretty, focusing on the contents rather than curb appeal. Makes sense for your personal start page, but not so useful in blogs and other public pages where self expression is more important.
The real problem, though, is that I can’t show my NY Times widget on this page because it’s delivered in an iframe, which WordPress won’t render. Doh!
KickApps to the rescue
Fortunately, the NY Times widgets read content from RSS feeds (e.g. this feed of reggae music news), just like KickApps widgets. It’s a cinch to jump into the KickApps Widget Studio, paste the NY Times news feed, and create my own, personalized version of the same Widget.
In this case, I’ve also included some photos of recent Dub & Reggae community members, to jazz things up bit. Enjoy:
