dummied

Widgetize your world

At a glance

This entry was written on March 23, 2007.

The entry prior to this is entitled Unobtrusive Pageless Pagination in Rails.

The entry following this is entitled endless_pageless: An unobtrusive pageless pagination in Rails plugin.

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This entry has been tagged as Blogs, Newspapers, Recommended, TheOffice, Work, examples, photos.

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I had this idea with the first photo system I built, but today I managed to make it a reality by cranking out an embeddable widget for our Party Crasher photos in ”Steve,” the photo gallery management app I have built/am building for IndyStar.com.

You can see it in action in the left sidebar/content well over there.

I had the idea a while ago, but this blog post about a similar embeddable widget reminded me of it and I pitched the idea to my superiors. After they approved the idea, I carved out an hour or so of light dev time and produced the widget.

This particular widget has a few caveats/features. It uses an iframe, so MySpace embedding is out until I can fiddle with Flash to make an alternate version. On the plus side, everything in the iframe’d page is a flexible width – photos, logos, everything – so savvy users could adjust the size at will and it’ll just expand/contract to fill. It’s a technique I use extensively in almost all the views in “Steve,” and almost every project I do now … but more on that in the future.

It automatically updates with the six most-recent Party Crasher photos (for now … I might be switching it to the six most-recent galleries tomorrow). The thumbnails link to our popup slideshow. This approach keeps clickers on whatever page they started out on while still managing to serve our ads and stat-tracking code.

Personally, I think it also lends a sense of transparency to the proceedings; if somebody didn’t know better, they’d think these photos were part of whatever site they’re currently surfing on.

Overall, it’s an easy way to provide at least a modest boost to page views and a best a sizable boost and a hefty dose of customer goodwill.

It’s also a keen illustration of the advantages of putting your photos into a flexible database-backed system like this (more here and here). This feature took next to no time to implement because the data was already there: organized and waiting for me. If I want to change it later, it’s easy to do.

And this is just a limited example. Imagine if I were still working on that first system I built, where you have constantly-updated galleries for teams, towns, sports and whatnot. Imagine having embeddable widgets for all of those options. High school sports teams and players, town websites, whatever … all displaying your photos, your ads and padding your stats.

… You know, that’s not a half-bad idea …

… Shame I’m not working on another photo gallery system …

Oh, and if you want to share the bar-hopping goodness on your own blog or site, the embed code is:

<iframe width="200px" height="360px" src="http://www2.indystar.com/phototools/widgets/intake/test" scrolling="no" frameborder="0"></iframe>