WidgetNest Incubator

Faninjas!

Dave — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 06:18:13 +0000

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!

The Future, Thank You.

Dave — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 03:37:18 +0000

WidgetNest team member David has recently accepted a position with the awesome team at Widgetbox. (See his own take in it here.) What does this mean for WidgetNest? Most likely we will no longer be accepting client work. We will continute to mantain what widgets we have developed and serve so far.

Don’t worry about us. We have lots of other projects and ideas unrelated to widgets that we are sure will be awesome.

Keep checking back for more updates. In the mean time, we thank everyone that we have worked with and worked for over the last year and half or so. Also, a big thank you to our users. You all are awesome.

Thanks!

NASA Image of the Day

Dave — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:21:58 +0000

Space. The final frontier. Also, our latest widget. I am totally ruining the cadence and meaning of this iconic phrase.

Yes, we just completed a new widget. The NASA Image of the Day widget. We are fans of space and space exploration. If you are also a fan of these things, put this widget on your site.

Widget update: Propeller Widget

Dave — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:26:27 +0000

A long time ago, back when Netscape.com was a sort of Digg.com clone we made a widget that showed the top Netscape stories. Later, AOL (who own Netscape) decided to move it to Propeller.com - well recently they changed the scope of Propeller.com again. Now it still has news but it is less like a Digg.com clone. Actually, it seems to be full of a lot of spam and inappropriate content. Sad, really. The original (well, the original NEW Netscape) was actually pretty cool.

Oh well. To keep with the times we’ve updated the Propeller widget but it isn’t what it used to be. Goodbye Propeller. If you change again we probably wont keep up. This is the end.

Twitter Widget Update

Dave — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:16:24 +0000

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.

Twitter Trouble

Dave — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:45:43 +0000

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!

Candidate Widgets

Dave — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:38:15 +0000

As the 2008 presidential election approaches, we are reminded of all that has happened in the last year or so. We have tried to keep our candidate widgets up to date as best we can, as well as the list of current and past candidates. Sometimes, however, we miss stuff. Luckily, people more aware than we are send us friendly requests and reminders.

With that, I am pleased to introduce the Bob Barr and Ralph Nader presidential campaign widgets.

Yep, our “current candidate” count jumped back up to four from two. Awesome.

Enjoy.

NabberHackey and CakePHP

Dave — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:40:40 +0000

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.

Nabberhackey Update

Dave — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:05:37 +0000

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.

Blog Update

Dave — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:58:49 +0000

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

Wordpress.org