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

Data Files

Data files are the contents you want displayed in the widget.

The most important factor is that the source data be valid html. If it is not valid, netvibes will reject it and it won't be rendered. It should validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

The data file will run on your server. This means you can use the programming language native to your site. The idea is that you write a script to generate the content you want. Then ezWidgets pulls in this data to be presented in the various formats.

Important notes:

  • You must include or be able to key off of a unique string in the data file for the SourceTrimStart and SourceTrimEnd variables in the config file.
  • Your SourceTrimStart and End should fall inside the body tag of the page. This means when the string is extracted based on the SourceTrim variables it will be an isolated chunk from within the body tag of the page. The ezWidges engine will wrap that html in the appropriate container. This is necessary due to the variety of needs for the various portal systems. If the sole purpose of the page is to feed data to the widget you could use the body tags as your trim variable settings.
  • The data file must be on the same site as the config file. This means you can't directly use a third site as the data source. This is to prevent ezWidgets from becoming a screen scrapping service, and aggravating web site owners! You can however host a data source on your server which screen scraps what ever you want.
  • The data source must contain valid html. This is the number one factor contributing to broken widgets. Validate your html!

Sample data file:

Take a look at the data source file for the Daily Slurp widget:

http://www.dailyslurp.com/widgetSample/DailySlurp.aspx

Notice the <!--START_OUTPUT--> and <!--END_OUTPUT--> comment tags. These are what the widget keys off of for this data file. In this case the data file doesn't generate a body tag, this was left out on purpose. We do however get some junk that asp.net has thrown in. The Trim tags allow us to prevent this extra stuff from flowing through into the final widget.

Continue onto config files »