Not sure if I should say this lest a malicious hacker ever decides to take over our site, but we are building project NabberHackey with the CakePHP framework. We ran in to a snag these last few weeks in that we could get the home page to work properly but then any other page we made would show an internal server error. After a lot of prodding, we discovered that our custom folder structure (maybe we should have gone with the vanilla cakePHP install…) was causing issues with .htaccess. After some searching and tweaking all is now in working order.

Frameworks are nice because they make development faster. Now that the framework is actually working as it should, our development should start to really pick up.

Working on graphics and copy tonight. Jared is busy researching other aspects of the code.

Update for project Nabberhackey: Main widget package structure is complete. What does this mean? Well, in order to offer downloads of our widgets, we need to know what to package together. We have updated our code and put together the archetype for the downloadable package.

The download will include things like the compiled swf, some usage instructions, and some configuration files. We may also include information and instructions on how to track widget usage as well. Actually, and this isn’t something we have discusses, but we might even just throw in an entire widget tracking package. Jared, what are your thoughts? I could probably ask you this in person…

Anyway, that is where we stand. I am going to start developing the user facing site soon.

We keep moving forward.

Updated the blog to the newest version of Wordpress. Hooray! If you haven’t maybe you should consider it.

Wordpress.org

As part of our ongoing quest for excellence, it is our pleasure to introduce to the world Project Naberhackey. Nabberhacky is the code name for our current widget project. What is it? You ask. I will tell you.

We are building a widget editing/management system that would give users total control over their widgets. So, unlike sites like Widgetbox that allow you to configure widgets and embed them on certain pages, we are hoping to allow users to actually host their configurations of the widgets on their own servers as well as provide instructions for distribution and maintainance. The technology behind this is going to be pretty slick, though I must say that this first version will be pretty basic. We have decided to take a very itterative approach with this project as will be rolling out updates pretty constantly over a longer period of time after initial release.

There are two main forces behind this project. First, a lot of our core business has been customizing widgets we have already made for others’ use. We do get to work on some new and different widgets now and again, but mainly people want skinned versions of some of our more popular content. This tool will allow its users to do the skinning easily on their own, then download the finished product. Second, we believe that as the web moves forward, while there is substantial hype about distributed systems and cloud computing, that at the end of the day people are going to want control over their assets. Since users will be able to download copies of the widgets they configure, they have total control over them.

As I said a few posts ago. We are striving to be more open about our work. I hope to have more to share with you soon. Thanks.

Just added a really simple AS3 class to our code page. It is a utility class called “Link” that has one method, “go,” that acts like the “getURL” method so familiar to those that are used to programming ActionScript 2. Included in the file are some examples and the class itself.

Enjoy.

During the week we will be doing some site changes. It might not seem like anything major has changed, but we are restructuring a lot of things internally. If there are short outages, we apologize.

Along with some server changes we are also going to start making some changes to our business. We will still offer our custom-made widget service, but we are going to be doing things a little differently. I can’t say too much right now, but in the coming months there will be some dramatic changes to the WidgetNest brand. Some of these changes will even be viewed more externally, as we strive to be transparent with our business practices and proceducres. As we have alluded to before, we are in the middle of some pretty awesome projects. So awesome, in fact, that they are taking up a lot of our time. We hope to start documenting our progress, in an effort to help others know what it is we are doing.

We have often wondered “what do people do all day?” when we think about all the startups and small development teams there are out on the web. We have finally decided to help answer that question. We will be updating this blog regularly with recaps of the day’s or week’s activity as well as our thought processes and actual work methodology. We are not worried about people stealing our ideas. We are prepared for critique and discussion. This will be a learning experience for us all.

Hope you all will enjoy it as much as we will.

Thanks.

Hello friends, family, followers, and strangers. WidgetNest, in a move to complete some internal projects and development, had decided to go on Sabbatical from client work. From now until the end of the summer we are not taking any new client work. At the end of the summer we should have some stuff to show.

We will try and put updates here when we can. Until then, keep it real. See you on the other side.

Love,

Team WidgetNest

Have you had a change to check out Yahoo! Buzz? Pretty nifty service.

“Yahoo! Buzz features the most popular stories right now, determined by people around the Web.” Buzz is generated by user voting in a Digg-style ranking system. Stories are subimtted by publishers.

Just for fun we made a widget that shows the top stories from the Yahoo! Buzz home page. We are piggybacking on another amazing service, Dapper, to extract the data.

Check it out: Yahoo! Buzz Top Stories Widget

Our latest widget:

March Madness 2008

This was fun to make and it is just as fun to use (I think, anyway, but I am biased.) Check it out and let us know what you think.

Our This or That widget is already more popular than some of the presidential candidates. What does that mean? Well….. that …. something.