Snipperoo Sizzles
Written on February 2, 2007 by Conor O'Neill
After some hand-holding from Ivan, I got Snipperoo working on my personal blog. The basic misunderstanding I had was that I thought all the widgets shown in the help screens were pre-existing ones I could add to my panel with one click whereas in fact you have to create each one by hand. This sounds awkward but isn’t. Just take the normal snippet of code you would use to show that widget on your blog and paste it into a new “module” in Snipperoo. I did this with all my existing widgets and replaced a mess of code in my sidebar with a single Wordpress Sidebar Text Widget pointing over to Snipperoo.
Now any time I want to add or remove cool widgets, I wander over to Snipperoo, do the changes and they automatically appear on the blog. In this early phase you don’t gain an enormous amount over using standard Wordpress Sidebar widgets but the potential is clear to see, particularly when all the most popular ones become one click additions.
Whilst the directory/gallery is confusing at the minute, at least you can see the multitude of widgets available. I could waste hours in there. I’m looking forward to the site revamp, particularly in this area.
I’ve only had one issue so far - the FeedButton widget seems to be not only incompatible when embedded in Snipperoo, it won’t even co-exist in the sidebar with it. I’ve removed it for the minute as it’s not the most important widget around.
I’m convinced that having a blog or public social networking page will become as ubiquitous as having a mobile phone. Not everyone will be a “blogger” in the current sense of the term but we’ll all have an online identity (”all” meaning those with some form of broadband). Given this, we’ll each want a custom identity, but far beyond our ringtones and crappy MySpace wallpapers. Widgets will provide a lot of that identity by pulling in and pushing out data to and from the edges and presenting the virtual you.
Technorati Tags: Snipperoo, Widgets, Ivan+Pope
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Well done! I knew you’d like it when you got it working. Luckily the next version is bit clearer and a lot nicer to use.
As for the Feedbutton issue, I’m not sure exactly what you mean. I’ve installed it in our blog and it doesn’t cause any problems. That said, it doesn’t work very well in overlaying the widget below - but that’s a Feedbutton javascript issue I think.
I’ve had feedbutton as code directly in the sidebar for ages but if I try to put it in either via Snipperoo or via its own Wordpress Text Widget, it breaks all of the sidebar content below it. So it’s an issue for them rather than you.
The danger now is that I’m going to turn into Fred Wilson. BLING!
“I’m convinced that having a blog or public social networking page will become as ubiquitous as having a mobile phone. Not everyone will be a “blogger†in the current sense of the term but we’ll all have an online identity”
Agreed. But I think a blog will merely be a rendering of a subset of our online identity which will be a feed of all our digital outputs, the ticker tape of our lives (or what I like to call our uniFeed). Other online apps like our photo sharing and bookmarking services will render other subsets of our uniFeed through microformats.
In essence the web will browse us instead of us browsing the web and we’ll have personal APIs against which services can run queries. I was only half-joking when I wrote “I’m an application”
When I say “break”, all the content below starts overlapping the main text area and is pushed down the page too. This is without clicking on it. I’m using the Sandbox theme with Kubrick Skin for testing over at conoroneill.com
Funny you should say tickertape, I’m thinking of doing a simple post on my personal blog to explain what RSS is to my mainly non-tech readership over there. I was going to use the tickertape analogy for RSS.
Interesting that you see it as a feed, whereas I prefer the idea of those crazy kitchen-sink MySpace pages or even Fred Wilson’s Blog. The blog is the container to present all those feeds (including normal blog posts) so people can see “what you are about” at any moment in time. And Widgets are the enabler for that. The two-way widgets are the ones I’d love to play with.
The issue with feeds (if I’m understanding you correctly) is that I may not be interested in what you are up to for long periods or I may only be interested in part of what you are about *cough* Bernie’s flickr photos of floor tiles *cough*.
Of course we’ll hopefully get to the point pretty quickly where you provide all your feeds and we select the aggregated sub-set that we find interesting. I’m still amazed how little has been done in the area of filtering feeds.
Hey, Ryan from FeedButton here.
Can you take a screenshot of what problem it’s causing? I’d like to see if I can maybe resolve the issue in the next update to feedbutton.. and I haven’t yet gotten any complaints (not to say that they don’t exist… people just probably haven’t complained)
Feel free to contact me at my email listed.
Thanks,
Ryan
Will do, Ryan. I’ll send them to you direct.