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

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.

Not that there are very many people that read this blog (yet), but we will be updating our site tonight and making a few announcements as well. Until then, take care.

-Team WidgetNest

Somehow we managed to kill comments. We will get those working soon. Probably.

UPDATE: Comments are now fixed.

Our two latest widgets:

I can has cheezburger

Technorati Blog Response

Both of these widgets are a result of slow work days. The I Can Has Cheezeburger widget shows the latest pics from the lolcat blog icanhascheezburger.com. The Technorati widget, when placed on a website, shows the latest blog entries from the web about that website.

There are some pretty cool projects going on in the background. I wish I could say more about them but we don’t want to give our enemies the competition any details. Not that we have much competition. Speaking of which, we should start a widget prank war somehow. Or some kind of widget race. Yeah. Anyway, we will keep you posted.

Welcome to the Incubator, the official blog of WidgetNest, a widget development company. We will use this blog to talk about WidgetNest, widgets, and internet development.

So, why widgets? There are several reasons:

1. Widgets are a fun distribution platform.
2. Widgets provide a unique development environment, one must fit a functional and useful web app in to a small, compact space.
3. Being able to provide website owners with easy to use, “plug and play” web solutions is satisfying.
4. Creating something and watching it become viral, is rewarding.
5. Widgets are portable. From the web to the desktop and to several mobile devices widgets are capable of reaching a very large audience.
6. Widgets are fun to make.

We are striving to be the best widget development company on the internet. There are many great distribution platforms for widgets, like Widgetbox, Clearspring, SpringWidgets, etc. These services provide amazing tools to help with the distribution and tracking of widget but they rely on developers to add content to their sites. It has been our experience that with a good widget platform you need a good widget developer.

Who do web businesses turn to to create their widgets? They can rely on their own development staff, but the crack team of developers on their team might not understand compact formats or how to make something that can be spread virally on the web. By striving to be the best widget development company there is, we are able to take time to study multiple platforms, test out viral campaigns, and find ways to best help our clients.

What we are trying to say is that we like widgets. Are widgets the future of the web? Who knows, but they are something that we enjoy and for now that is all that matters.

-Team WidgetNest