I'm hosting a WordCamp kickoff dinner tomorrow night starting at 6:30 p.m. at Taylor's Automatic Refresher at the Ferry Building. It's our second-annual WordCamp kickoff dinner welcoming visitors from out of town with burgers, beer, and blogs along the San Francisco waterfront.
In this post I'll outline different ways you can take advantage of Google's architecture to serve your widget content to the world. I'll cover various depths of integration and their branding and licensing issues.
In this post I'll provide tips and tricks for widget developers interested in serving fast, reliable widget content to as many people as possible. I'll highlight some of the best practices for serving web content and their specific application towards widget development.
In my last post I wrote about web widget formats: the ways we render widget content within another web site. Web widgets are dynamic, living, breathing pieces of content and often need new data from external services to stay fresh and topical. In this post I'll summarize popular methods of updating a widget's dynamic data using remote HTML framing, plain-text, JSON, XML, and web feeds. I will detail use cases of each format, provide example data to illustrate the data, and document the appropriate request and parsing libraries in major web widget platforms.
Web widgets vary by platform and provider but generally come in four basic flavors: JavaScript, embedded object, blog plugin, and frames. Anyone publishing widget content online should know a few basic concepts shaping their decision and choose the right mix of software and content based on their target. In this post I'll walk through some of the basic advantages, disadvantages, and considerations for each type of widget content and bring you up-to-speed on a few current widget deployment options.
Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »