Posts Tagged 'Widgets'

API Knowledge
A key tool for any budding web developer is API knowledge. It’s good to familiarise yourself with a variety of application interfaces. I started out using the Twitter REST API with PHP and CURL when twitter first launched the API to basically get a users tweets, pretty simple now I look back, but at the time it was the first time i’d done such a thing. As the development of social media continues this will increasingly open up opportunities to develop more and more …

I wrote a post a while back when I purchased my iobridge module which you can use to control switched and sensor. After that post I had my module rigged up in my office at home just monitoring the room temperature and ambient light hourly, I wasn’t sure what i could do with this data at the time so using the Google Ajax API I displayed the data using 2 graphs purely as a bit of fun. Now i’ve decided to take it a stage …

In this tutorial we’re going to take an RSS feed from the top videos page on MySpace and make a widget to display the latest videos using jQuery pagination, ajax and a spot of PHP to parse the feed. The basic logic of what is going on is simple. We parse an XML file echo all the results, then we use the quick paginate plugin to display a select number of results with the option to browse pages.
Lets first take a look at the PHP …

I recently had the need to build a dynamic form preview tool for work so clients could preview how the text and images would look before submitting the content to be published. I’ve trimmed down the code and removed the database part completely from this example so we can concentrate purely on the JavaScript.

The JavaScript

$(document).ready(function(){
$(‘#preview’).hide();
$("#photo").click(update);
$("#title").keypress(update);
});

function update(){

$(‘#preview’).slideDown(’slow’);
var title = $("#title").val();
var photo = $("#photo").val();
$(‘#Displaytitle’).html(title);
$(‘#image’).html(‘<img src="’+photo+’"/>’);
}

The HTML

<div class="left">
<form>
Choose a site<br/>
…

I want to start this post by saying that I’m not a fan of using iframes, however, sometimes due to restrictions within some development environments it may be the only way to embed content into your site of blog.
So whats the point i hear you cry. This code is really only useful if your distributing and sharing widgets from your site. So say you have your own social network and you want to open up the data allow users to embed portions of your site …

Widgets fit perfectly into a world where information makes it’s self available where ever the end user wants it. Widgets offer the great ability to be placed where the community will use it the most thus maximising a marketers message within the product.
Tracking widgets is easy with tools such as clearsprings and Gigya. These services allow users to virally spread your message throughout the net easily integrating your product in social networks and blogs. A site that’s bringing widget making to the masses is Sproutbuilder.com. …