So here's a good idea that's not quite right in terms of it's implementation. Sites like widgetbox (www.widgetbox.com) offer some rather cool add-ons for your blog site. In theory all you need to do is click a few times, and voila, you have a widget in your blog. This is a two part operation. The providing site generates some javascript and/or HTML and the receiving site (your blog) pastes that piece of script into place. An interface between the two helps to automate the process. Or so it seems. I tried several times to get a countdown widget from widgetbox (and from Krista's blog: http://kristalcs855.blogspot.com/) with no success. What I get is an empty box with the rather sad title of "No widget found". I'm sure this is yet another case where despite nearly 40 years of programming in various languages, I just don’t get the concept. I'm usually trying too hard to understand how it works rather than how one might use it. None the less, I don’t have a working widget and I don’t know why. As I have done in the past, I right-click the page and take a look at the source. This is, of course, the source generated by the server which is often not the 'source' code but rather the intermediate result of a load of code on the server and an HTML page template of some kind. In other words, without knowing the intent of the original author, I don’t get any real clues as to why it doesn't work. If I were to ask Kristal, I'm sure she'd say "It worked fine for me". Oh to be the chosen one. But sadly, that is not my lot. I dutifully register, click the buttons and fail - almost every time.
So based on my experience (not yours, mine) I have to say that although the idea is pretty cool and although it seems to work for the chosen ones, it doesn't work for me and I suspect for many others too. And for those of us for whom it does not work, we have no real way to find out why not. And this is a problem because in the brave new world of Web N.0 (where N is a number in a monotonically increasing series) there will be many widgets and all the cool people will have them on their blogs and on their phones and even tattooed into their skin, but I will be left with a pale grey rounded rectangle containing the words "No widjet found".
To add insult to the programming injury, the failed widget includes a button: "Get Widget" so that you too can have a failed widget. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you will click the button under my failed widget and it will work for you. Please let me know if it does so I can order a bigger supply of anti-depression meds next time around.
Nigel
(without a widjet to my name)
4 comments:
Once I posted this rather long complaint - it started working. It's chopped off at the right but that's a layout problem. I still haev no idea why it didn't work the first time or why it's wokring now.
NT
I was just about to say that it seems to be working.
I was able to use your "Add Widget" button to add it to my blog.
This one is a bit trickier than most, since you have to generate code for the given time and paste it in.
Edit the width parameter in the script.
You can change the background image also.
Those are pretty cool widgets on that site (and they have a ton of them). I added the super mario bros game to my blog, which actually plays like the real thing, although it's a little hard to see things as side column layout is fairly narrow. For a 20 year old video game, it's still entertaining. Also, according to Wikipedia, Super Mario Bros is the #1 selling video game of all time with 40 million copies sold.
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