A new wiki article has been published that explains how to dynamically pass content into a widget:
This is a particularly useful feature if you would like to use a widget as a template, and have that widget present unique content on different areas of your website.
Check it out here; it's very easy to do! http://developer.newsgator.com/wiki/index.php?title=Using_Dynamic_Content
I was recently clued into this neat Cornify easter egg:
http://paulirish.com/2009/cornify-easter-egg-with-jquery/
That does nothing more than place unicorns, rainbows, and happy words on a web page. So naturally I embedded this code in a widget so you can take unicorns with you when you visit social sites.
Try it out, or share it!
Widget Builder - New content type: "Topics & Keyphrases Only." The widget will only return the topics, keywords, and keyphrases for an article page that the widget is residing on. This feature can be found in the content area, on the "Other" tab.
Facebook Wizard - Updated wizard to reflect changes on Facebook's side.
Keyword search - Improvements made to the infrastructure to return better results:
Say you've got a viral (or better yet, cobranded) widget, and you'd like to control when the ad shows up. How do you go about this? Right now we're working on building this functionality into our Editor's Desk, but in the meantime we've got a new Wiki article that explains how to do it:
http://developer.newsgator.com/wiki/index.php?title=Conditional_Ad_Placement
For some background, here's how to put ads into your widgets:
http://developer.newsgator.com/wiki/index.php?title=Putting_Ads_into_Widgets
And while that's all fine and good, we can do the work for you with our AdBurner utility. Sound interesting? Contact sales@newsgator.com.
If you're a regular reader of this blog, I hope a lot of the articles have empowered you to make the snazziest widgets possible using our highly-configurable framework. One thing I find myself struggling with, and something that I haven't touched on much before, is the best possible way to find the richest and most relevant content for your widget (or your reader).
When considering Related Content (see the how-to articles here and here), to make the most effective widget is to have a robust whitelist of blogs and other feeds that contain similar post items. How to find the best ones though? Well, now Editor's Desk features a utility that lets you search for a topic and find feeds that we've found to contain it.
In Editor's Desk, under the Utilities menu, go to "Related Content Search." Now enter a topic, and we'll return a list of feeds. From the results list you can have a closer look at the RSS, or you can add it to a whitelist.
There are two ways you can take advantage of this utility:
1. You're building a related content widget, but haven't found enough content for your whitelist.
For the related content widget right here on this blog, I searched for "web syndication," "RSS," and "widgets." These were all topics that feeds in my whitelist returned anyway, so I just wanted to include a greater breadth of content to share through the widget.
2. You want to find feeds that focus on certain topics to put into a widget, or to put in your personal reader (like FeedDemon or NetNewsWire, right?)
I searched for "monkeys" and "coen brothers" and found some cool feeds to put into FeedDemon.
Now go forth and topics search!
Some exciting stuff is being made available with this load. I'm happy to announce a new feature that lets you search for feeds that contain a particular topic: this will help you build whitelists for searching and related content. Here's a direct link to it in Editor's Desk (you must be logged in): http://hosted.newsgator.com/ADMIN/Pages/EditorsDesk/RelatedContentSearch.aspx
We also fixed the bug that caused Facebook widgets to not have an "Add to Profile" button. As you may recall (from this post), Facebook made some changes which broke that feature, but we fixed it.
Admin
Widgets
Facebook made some behind the scene changes (again) that made the "Add to Profile" button disappear when adding a widget to Facebook. We're on top of this and working on a fix right now that will be loaded soon (keep an eye out for release notes on this blog).
Also, when creating a Facebook application in Editor's Desk, please note that the default FBML field has been moved from the profile section to the pages section. This will also be fixed in the wizard.
Facebook is sure keeping us on our toes...
Got any questions? Contact plsupport@newsgator.com
Want to sit back and watch me explain related content for you?
(It's easier than reading documentation, isn't it?)
This handy utility takes an RSS feed as input and provides a list of all the elements that are useful in your widgets. You can try it out here:
I made a bookmarklet for it, so you when you are viewing a feed in your browser you can just click a link to see the post content. This even works on regular websites: for instance, if you are visiting http://www.cnn.com, our system will be able to determine the RSS feed for that site and pull up the content. Go ahead an click on it to see what happens!
NewsGator Feed Analyzer Bookmarklet
In Firefox, just drag that link up to your toolbar. In IE, right-click on the link and add to favorites.
Why use it?
It's a far simpler way of viewing the content of a feed than looking through the XML for what can be used in a widget.
What does it all mean?
The analyzer lists the following for items in the feed.
I like using the analyzer to see if items have thumbnails or video/audio content associated with them.
Today we will be loading the following new features into production. The most exciting addition is HowStuffWorks. If you use this search option in your widget, our framework will analyze the page the widget is residing on and return content from HowStuffWorks.com. This feature can be enabled for your widget account by contacting sales@newsgator.com.
The load will take place some time this afternoon, so all of these will be available later today!
Editor's Desk
Widgets
