Widget Death Match » new york times http://www.widgetdeathmatch.com Faster Widget! Kill! Kill! Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:23:44 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Giving New York Times widgets a facelift http://www.widgetdeathmatch.com/2008/12/giving-new-york-times-widgets-a-facelift.html http://www.widgetdeathmatch.com/2008/12/giving-new-york-times-widgets-a-facelift.html#comments Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:49:23 +0000 chris http://www.widgetdeathmatch.com/?p=16 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:

  1. Options to browse popular content categories, such as Home Page or Business articles.
  2. A search feature for finding more specific categories.
  3. One-click tools for adding tabs to your NY Times widget.
  4. Options for showing headlines vs. blurbs and photos.
  5. 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:

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