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

Configuration files

The config file is what tells the ezWidget application what to do.

  • Think of it as defining the variables to be passed into a function, which is essentially what is happening.
  • Config files are case sensitive. All variable names should be in lower case as seen in the sample file below.
  • The config file is saved on the server and is not updated until its path is entered into the create widgets form again.

 

A Sample config file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

<config>

<datasource>http://www.dailyslurp.com/data.aspx</datasource>

<title>The Daily Slurp</title>

<sourcetrimstart><!--START_OUTPUT--></sourcetrimstart>

<sourcetrimend><!--END_OUTPUT--></sourcetrimend>

<height>250</height>

<othergooglevariables>

description="A long description of your service." author_email="you@yourdomain.com"
author="Your Name"
title_url="http://www.yourdomain.com"
screenshot ="http://www.yourdomain.com/screenshot.gif"
thumbnail ="http://www.yourdomain.com/thumb.gif"

</othergooglevariables>

</config>

Base variables

required= a required variable

requiredDataSource

The url to the data source. Must be on the same site as the config file.

requiredTitle

The title to be placed at the top of the widget.

requiredsourcetrimstart

Everything before this string in the data source is removed.

requiredsourcetrimend

Everything after this string in the data source is removed

This pair of source trim strings allows you to isolate a portion of a page.

FAVICCONURL

This is the url to the favicon for your widget. This should be a full path beginning with http://

 

Google only variables

requiredheight

This sets the height of the module on the google home page. This is the only extra variable required to get the google widgets working

Othergooglevariables

This string can contain as many variables as you want. Some of these are recommend if you plan to let others consume your widget. If it is for personal one off usage, then it is purely optional.

Find out more about some of the settings you can pass into the Google Widgets.

 

Important things to know

  1. When you use the create widgets form we actually save a copy of the config file to our server. This is the copy that will be used, even if you delete the one on your server. So should you need to update your config file simply do so on your server and resubmit it using the create widgets form.
  2. We recommend you use all lowercase letters in the path to your config file. This will avoid confusion with web servers that are case sensitive.
  3. You can actually hide your config information in your data file. Just put it inside a comment tag at the end of your page. Putting it at the beginning won't work since the trim tags in the config would be found before the one in the content.

Continue onto create a widget »