Ivan’s put a nifty ‘how to‘ movie up over at Snipperoo – explaining how to use Snipperoo to simplify adding a flickr badge to your site, to be specific. Go on. Give it a try.
In Ivan’s how to he adds a flickr badge displaying pictures of his kids to the Widgeteer demo blog. What I like about this badge is that it features – apart from lots of pics of people who obvioulsy are Ivan’s kids – a picture of me! I feel obliged to tell you that Ivan Pope is not my Dad.
Like I said the other day we’re looking for someone to develop a clean, usable web widget for eBay. We’ve had a number of promising responses to our request but I’ve now got a nice two-page tech spec for the widget from Jay, our tech head, so if this gets you interested, do drop me a line. We’re looking for a fixed price.
Download the widget spec (PDF).
Ivan’s in California engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the competition at Widgets Live. Here in London Jay’s been judging the BBC Backstage widget competition. Entries had to make use of the Beeb’s various feeds and services. Most of them are desktop widgets but Jay’s already stuffed one of them into the Snipperoo Directory because it’s a Google widget and you’re allowed to put them on your own site.
Could you code a clean, usable web widget using the eBay API.
Required functionality
• The widget will display a user’s eBay items for sale (and possibly some other stuff) on their blog or homepage, using a script tag that renders the widget’s content.
• Users will add the widget to their pages using Snipperoo’s neat widget management system.
• The widget will fetch the data it needs via the eBay API.
• We want you to write both the client-side javascript responsible for displaying the items, and the server-side code that communicates with the eBay API and that is ultimately responsible for the content shown via the script tag.
• The server-side code can be either PHP5 or Rails. Snipperoo will host this code.
• We expect this development to take 2 or 3 days.
• eBay don’t have a widget that displays items for sale at the moment but they’ve asked us to build this and make it available to the world as an experiment.
Drop me a line (steve@snipperoo.com) if you’d like to have a go. Please let me know your price for the job.
About Snipperoo
Snipperoo makes managing the widgets in your sidebar easy and efficient. We aim to eliminate cut-and-paste entirely for bloggers who want to add content and features to their web sites, make it easier for widget creators to distribute their product and help site hosts and blogging companies by offering their users lots of funky add-ons.
Snipperoo‘s invitation-only beta test is under way now. Keep up with the news at the Snipperoo blog.
Most of the Snipperoo gang spent the last two days in the smelly, decrepit Olympia 2 exhibition hall at a show called ad:tech. London doesn’t have any decent exhibition venues and Olympia must be the least pleasant on planet earth. The atmosphere was… er… enhanced by the presence at the show of dozens of gaming and casino businesses with their retinues of semi-naked babes and sweaty blokes giving out lap dancing flyers.
The shabby, inaccessible venue was built when trade exhibitions typically featured a hall full of steam looms and tweedy men demonstrating agricultural machinery. The silver lining? We met loads of a) developers whose creativity will flood the widgeverse with… er… widgets (including several real, live beta testers) and b) lots of media owners and potential distribution partners who really seemed to get the Snipperoo doctrine. We’re inspired.
Today (approximately) is the first day of the rest of my life. I’m sitting here staring at a metaphorical blank sheet of paper with ‘Snipperoo‘ written at the top. Ivan is sending me inspiring texts (all of which I’ve read before, obviously). Snipperoo was sort of launched in Holland the other day (we chose Holland because they were kicked out of the World Cup one round earlier than England and have thus had a bit more time to get over it) and Russell Davies, another old-timer, has been saying nice things about us on his blog. I know, I’ll phone Ivan.
Ploughing through a load of reading around my new gig today. I’ve joined my old mate Ivan Pope in a new business called Snipperoo. We’re going to revolutionise (obviously) the widget business. Never again will you have to cut-and-paste a line (or a paragraph or a page…) of scary-looking code into your blog’s HTML just to add a simple function like a weather ticker or links to your flickr pics or your diary. From now on you’ll just click the Snipperoo button. I’ll let that sink in. In the meantime, here are some pics of Ivan and Jay Gooby (the technical genius) in Brighton yesterday (plus a couple with new tattoos at Brighton Station). Here’s the Snipperoo blog, to which I will be contributing from now on and here, in the next days and weeks you’ll see the Snipperoo beta. Visit the site now and you can sign up for the beta.