Month two of this project ends today. The widget is done and posted on Konfaulator’s and Yahoo’s widget galleries (same gallery with different fronts). The only real part that I didn’t complete is when removing a product. Rather than giving the product title, the ISBN/ASIN is shown, which makes it difficult to figure out which one to delete. It’ll have to stay like that for now. To fix I would have to re-do the feed being used by the widget. Only a slight change is needed, but the month is up and I don’t want to risk messing something up.
Languages:
Javascript

Database:
MySQL

Open Source Software Used:
None(?)

Technologies:
Yahoo’s Widget Engine

My first time working with:
Yahoo’s Widget Engine

Popularity: 5% [?]

I got some good feedback on the widget from my forum post. I added the ability to resize the widget by dragging the lower right corner. I initially allowed for resizing with both height and width, but I pulled out width because it didn’t really add much. I also made it so the widget loads all prior products when it starts. Before it was just loading the first one, then it would load the rest as it went about its normal updating.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I made a small page for downloading the widget and posted it to the Konfabulator forum.  I’m hoping to get some descent feedback before fully releasing this thing into the wild.  I was able to clean up most of the small UI issues, so I think its pretty user friendly at this point.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Most of the real work on the widget is done. What is left to do is smaller items that will improve the user’s experience. Users can now customize the products, wishlists, or categories they want to track. The data is all merged together and displayed nicely. I implement a way for the widget to cycle through the feeds for updates, which should help server load. As with the reguler RSStalker feeds there will be a cache on the server side that is updated automatically.

I also want to put together a small page desribing the widget and how it works and post it on the RSStalker site.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I just hit my first real snag with this widget.  I realized that to make it useful you have to let users add a bunch of products, wishlists, categories and merge all those feeds into one unified output.  I have everything working nicely for one feed, but dealing with mulitple feeds is a bit more of an issue.  I’ll have to keep track of which items within the feeds have been displayed already.  Plus, I’ll as new entries are found I’ll have to slide down the old entries, rather than just refreshing the whole list, as I would have done with just a single feed.

Essentially I’m writing a pretty full fledged widget RSS aggregator.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I had to make a custom feed type at RSStalker to accomodate the widget. I called it “raw” format. Basically it gives the data with a “|” seperator, so that the widget can parse out the fields and format the data.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The widget is coming along nicely. At first I made a simple RSS reader. It would pull in one feed and diplay the output. I don’t like the format though. The widget engine can’t display HTML, so I’m either going to have to parse out the data and reformat or create a custom feed for the widget.

Popularity: 3% [?]

This months site isn’t actually a site.  I know, only the second month of this and I’m already breaking the rules.  For this month I’ll be making a widget.

Sometime last year Yahoo bought the Konfabulator widget engine.  The big change they made was to make it free, greatly expanding it’s user base.  It is now the Yahoo! Widget Engine.  Widgets are written in Javascript.  There is also config file, .kon, that is XML based.  This will be my first attept at writing a widget, but Yahoo! did a nice job documenting the proccess and it looks pretty easy.

I guess I should descrive the function of the widget.  It will simply be an extension of the RSStalker site.  Users can add a product, wishlist or category from Amazon.com and get notified when the price changes.  Since the RSStalker site already provides XML feeds this widget will essentially be a reader for the site.

Popularity: 3% [?]