How ironic is that?

1. How can anyone keep calling that rocket exhaust a “spill?” Or a “leak” even?
2. Funny to think of Flash as an upgrade in this climate, but hey, it’s going to be around for a while.

It’s actually a good thing for PBS to offer. Not knocking their motivation. 

The question is “Do I want to make people who embed the widget see the ads.” No, I don’t think so.

Pro account explained. Do I have this right?

Does it look a little crazed? It’s meant to.

Get it at Clearspring.

Just fooling around with the Netflix feeds. Get the widget at Clearspring.

But I recommend the Clearspring version below over the Widgetbox version above because the Flash embed code allows script access, which makes the links on my pictures work, and lets the widget be more than a slideshow.

Are you tiring of congress members telling you what will fix the economy? I am. I liked the analysis (.pdf file) of Mark Zandi, an economist with Moody’s. So I illustrated it in Flash to help bring it home.

It’s just at Widgetbox for now.

Later: It looks like Widgetbox’s generated Flash embed code sets allowScriptAccess at “samedoman” but you can edit it to “always.” When you do, the link to the Zandi testimony will work. They must think widgetmakers will put in gratuitous links. Some would. 

The gadget XML file displays this page made with Expression Engine (my CMS) in the home view shown at left. I’ve used Expression Engine’s built-in Magpie feed parser to show the top item in the Google News quotes feed.

EE’s intelligent implementation of Magpie helped me pick apart Google’s quotes feed, which makes formatting a little tough if you stick to the standard description element. Within the feed they wrap “description” in an HTML table including elements using some of Google’s custom namespaces. Is that a good practice? Seems a little selfish to me, considering that a lot of the automatic feed rendering services can’t use anything except description, and a table will almost certainly mess up the output in many situations.

EE will recognize any standard or non-standard element in a feed, so it was just a matter of staring at the source and finding what the heck was meant by the snippet element or the occurrences element, and asking EE to render them in the right place.

For EE heads, my template code looks like this:

{exp:magpie url="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&as_qdr=d&as_drrb=q&as_mind=29&as_minm=12&as_maxd=30&as_maxm=12&nolr=1&output=rss&qsid=tPjE5CDNzMicGM" limit="1" refresh="60"}
    {items}
    <div class="quote">{snippet}</b>
    </div>
    <br />
    <div class="howmany">Quoted {occurrences} times by news outlets like <a href="{link}" target="_top">this</a>.
    </div>
    <br />
    {/items}
{/exp:magpie}

For the iGoogle canvas view I display this page, showing the top 5 quotes, and in this case I did output the whole tabled description element. It looks like this within iGoogle:

(Aside: it looks like Screentoaster got its audio recording going. Cool. I’ll have to try it out when I have more time.)

Orkut is Google’s socnet that’s hot among Brazilian users and in my geo community, Indian users. The destination for its full application link leads to the same canvas view used in iGoogle. It has a special view called “Profile” that appears on a user’s profile page and it’s kind of an awkward shape. Looks like this:

Embed the Google gadget in your page or blog, or add it to your iGoogle start page or add it to your Orkut profile.

I also made a page optimized for the iPhone. You can add it to your phone’s home screen by hitting the plus sign button. Did you know you can assign an iPhone icon to a domain by placing a graphic called apple-touch-icon.png in your domain’s web root? Nice, but it doesn’t work so well for me. What if I wanted another icon for some other iPhone page in sidebarstuff.com. Use another domain I guess? Is there an alternative?

Get it on Widgetbox or Google.

For something like my ”Search This” widget it’s perfect. I’ve built it using Expression Engine to do the work of rotating random entries so there’s no sense in trying to rewrite it in Javascript, or even in using the nice new libraries for PHP and other languages. If the widget took advantage of OpenSocial capabilities, that would be a different story.

The XML for my gadget is dead simple: 

Really! That’s the entire thing.

Here’s where you add my “Search This” gadget to iGoogle, or grab the embed code for a blog.