We are fans of Ask A Ninja, so we made this widget. I know I said we were done, but we decided to go out with a bang! Enjoy!

Just made some updates to the Twitter widget. We also got whitelisted for the API limit, so there shouldn’t be any more problems going forward.

Awesome.

We love Twitter. So much so that we made a Twitter widget. We are fortunate enough to have it on some pretty cool sites, even. Twitter has been having capacity and API issues and up until now we haven’t had a problem. Today I was alerted through email from one of our users that something wasn’t working. Twitter is limiting the rate at which clients can access feeds. This is understandable but since we server over 3,000 people with this widget if they all accessed it in one hour we wouldn’t be able to serve 2,900 of them.

Before this wasn’t an issue, but because of changes in security (for the better, so no complaints) and their API restrictions there is really no way for us to get the data we need. Even if we cached the data on our machine, as far as I can tell, we wouldn’t be able to get under that limit.

Anyway, we are trying to work out a solution. In the mean time, we apollogize. Happy Tweeting!

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.

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.

Born from our inability to find anything similar, we present to you Wishlist. Our first Widget/Web App. (Wigapp? Wapget? Anyone?)

Wishlist is a an application with which you can keep a wish list of things you would like, and then show those things on your website with our handy widget. The unique part of this simple project, however, is that it lives entirely on Widgetbox. Besides our description page and a bookmarklet, this application is built for working in the Widgetbox distribution platform. We did this for a couple of reasons, but the most prominent is that we want to test how an application in Widgetbox might perform.

So, without further ado, we officially launch version 1.0 of Wishlist: powered by WidgetNest in to the wild. We realize that it is very simple, but we already have plans for improvements and extra features. So, until then, please enjoy and let us know what you think.

Thanks.

Wishlist on WidgetNest

Wishlist on Widgetbox 

There is a lot going on in the widget world, especially ours. We are increasingly busy with projects and client work. I am constantly amazed that something I considered a hobby would turn in to a little self-sustaining business.

WidgetNest is not a widget provider or a distribution service. We let other people tackle that problem. Instead, we create the widgets themselves and it has been incredibly rewarding. In fact, today I was checking out a new podcast over at CNET called The 404. I was amazed to see a little friend of mine - a multimedia player I helped make a while back for Castfire, “an enterprise class platform for podcasting and videocasting.” I spent a lot of time on that player, and it is fun to see it around the internet.

I would like to congratulate MixerCast for their new series of funding. I do not know anyone on the team over there, but I do like their work. Anyway, as I said, there is a lot going on in the widget world.

Keep your eyes open, we have a lot going on.

I, like many people, don’t really love Internet advertising. At least not the annoying, ugly kind. There are, however, a few internet ads that are fun, informative, and useful. There are not enough of these ads. That is why we have updated the services page to include a new service - Interactive Advertising. From today forward, if you are in need of an interactive ad, please consider us as your ad developer.

This may come to a surprise to some people, but we already have experience in this field. Before WidgetNest, at least as it is known today, I had the opportunity to work with a couple different people on a unique Internet advertising campaign. The ads integrated data from the site’s RSS feed. Because the site’s major draw was its content, there was no better way to advertise the site than by using the content itself. In essence, the site did its own advertising. Those interested in the stories and articles were drawn to the site. With every site update, the ad updated itself to correspond.

There is a lot that can be done with Interactive advertising, and it can be done is a well designed, tasteful, and useful manner. No dancing people, not bouncing monkeys, just pure genius.

Wow, its been a hectic month. Between school, work, and widget development, things have been pretty crazy. The good news is that once the holidays are over things should return back to some state of “normal.” Other good news is that I got to work with Java a lot this last semester and I can honestly say that I think it is great. For my final project I got to make a client/server application and it pretty much rocks.

But what does that have to do with widgets? Well, I learned a lot more about coding and design patterns and I am sure they will help with future widget development. In fact, we plan on announcing some things around the new year that are pretty exciting.

Stay tuned, and happy holidays.