Argolon Solutions » widgets

Vote for PollDaddy in the Webware 100

Conor O'Neill — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:19:39 +0000

Not just because it is a brilliant product but also because Lenny, Jonathan and the guys have shown that small Irish technology companies can have global reach!

These guys pushed out 14 million polls last month and over half of them were non-English-language.

Vote early and often.

Snipperoo Sizzles

Conor O'Neill — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 23:08:10 +0000

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

Has anyone got Snipperoo working on their blog?

Conor O'Neill — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 11:10:58 +0000

I love the idea of Snipperoo and widgets in general. There is of course the conflict between widget-rich blogs and the tendency for people to read more and more via RSS but I still believe that the whole idea has legs.

I signed up for the beta when it was opened and got an account a few months back. I have made four serious attempts to configure a widget and have to admit that I’m flummoxed.

I’ve rebuilt linux kernels, compiled XEmacs on cygwin, debugged set-top boxes via RS232 but I cannot figure out how to add individual widgets to a panel.

Somehow something called Badgr appeared the last time I logged in and I could add that but I’ve no idea why. I’ve tried to follow the help page but I don’t get the option to add widgets no matter what I do. I just keep getting sent to a directory which has links to sites and for some bizarre reason other links which try to add widgets to my Google home page. What the hell am I missing? I hope the site revamp is rolled out soon as Snipperoo has so much potential.

Technorati Tags: snipperoo, widgets, UI+design