What is this?

ezWidgets is a rapid plugin deployment service. In a nutshell we take your data source and spin it into every widget and plugin we can find. Netvibes plugins, google personal home page, remote javascript.

This saves you the time and hassle of figuring out all the api's, when all you really want is a quick and simple way to add custom data to a variety of locations. Putting the data where you need it is our goal.

What is a widget?

The portals

Working samples

Current widgets:

bulletnetvibes.com
bulletpageflakes.com
bulletgoogle personalized
bulletremote JavaScript

 

other sites Design Meltdown The Daily Slurp PMcNeil.com

About ezWidgets

ezWidgets is the brain child of Patrick McNeil. Creator of Design Meltdown and the Daily Slurp. ezWidgets is the result of wanting to serve up the Daily Slurp in a variety of formats. I realized very quickly that the various plugin's for portal sites are all based on similar ideas, but in slightly altered formats. At the core, I had the same chunk of data to be repeated across the board. I began by wrapping that data in the various stuff needed to make a variety of plugins.

Originally I made an ok system for doing this, but with this new way of consuming my own data I soon found that I wanted other chunks of data on my Netvibes home page. Things like traffic stats, and sites pending moderation on the Daily Slurp, a whole variety of data I monitor. I love the portal idea, but it has to contain data I need on a day to day basis, stuff beyond the weather and movie times.

This is where ezWidgets comes in. It lets me get my data where I need it with out repeating all sorts of code. It also enables me to spin the content I generate into a variety of formats for the consumption of all, on their platform of choice.

One of the first questions I seem to get regarding all this is; Doesn't RSS solve this problem? Well it sort of does. In many cases you could just use RSS and this greatly simplifies things. Look at Daily Slurp widgets though, I wanted to display the images in a 3x3 grid, not a list of links. The images have far more impact. Another sample is if you wanted a status window for some data collected by an application. Writing out to an RSS feed would be messy, instead you can create a formatted HTML page with your data giving you far more control and options in terms of how it will look.

Sure ezWidgets won't work as an end all to creating plugin's. Many of them require complexities that won't work in this simplified environment. Where ezWidgets shines is in moving simple data to a central location.