SixApart’s Typepad is about to announce Widgets for bloggers. And this is about to simplify the life of million of bloggers who until now had more or less to deal with placing html code in their template to customize and enrich their blogs with third party features.
First this has nothing to do with Yahoo/Apple desktop Widgets. Typepad will offer users a much easier and seamless way to add side features (feedburner, technorati, Pandora favorites songs,…) to your blog without the necessity to go the service’s website (say Pandora) and do the usual copy/paste of the html code to include the mentioned feature. Those features are usually placed in side bars or Typelist. This was particularly not friendly for non-versed bloggers and we believe this will make 3rd party blog features much more popular.
Typepad offers a library of widgets (screenshot above) including for now 32 items to choose from in 6 categories (Games/ JobSearch / Music / Photos videos / Publishing / Search). You can subscribe this XML feed to be alerted on new items coming up. If you have a Typepad account all you have to do is click on a widget, edit the title, choose the placement and then publish it to your blog. No code, no mess, no margin for mistakes. For some reason at the moment I am writing this post some widgets have not been activated yet but it should be coming soon.
“…it is far easier to install a widget on TypePad than on any other blogging service. TypePad bloggers simply choose a widget from the TypePad Widget Directory . The blogger configures the widget at the builder’s site and then clicks once to post it to their TypePad blog. After the user previews the widget on their TypePad blog, they can confirm their selection and the widget will appear on their blog”
I tried the feature (you can see an example of integration of Sphere blog search on my Typepad Blog ) and it works quite well, you can easily relocate or remove widgets, and I believe it will save me some time from now on. However savvy bloggers who like to play with html snippets to customize their own widgets (for example to resize or remove some text) will probably go old-school and will still do it manually.
But the true novelty is that (at last!) Typepad decided to open their APIs for the community to build new widgets and enlarge the choice of services and items that will be available to Typepad blog users. The how-to is explained here.
Good ideas never come alone. Wordpress released a few days ago also SiderBar widgets as well as APIs for developers to build new items which is quite discussed. The easiness of integration in a blog is comparable to Typepad. One thing I liked there, is the possibility in a nice Ajax interface to edit your own text and place it in the side bar. The widget catalog (recent comments/ feed/ Flickr / Delicious and others) is not huge yet, but it sure will be soon. More here and there.
Blog platforms are making it easier for users to offer their readers nice looking and interesting blogs and this is good news. This should put a new quality standard in the blog plateforms industry.
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As I’m interested in future blogging myself, I’d like to try that service, too. An open API is something really cool nowadays, because developers can easily integrate new features. I like this way of software development which seems to be popular today.
But I miss a function for Last.fm.
The ordinary exported images of Last.fm are way too big (I don’t need to see “19:30 Wednesday”. A simple “19:30 Wed” or a date would do the job as well. My sidebar isn’t that big.
Hopefully Typepad will add this stuff later.
Competitive pressure is a good thing for users: http://wordpress.com/blog/2006.....ts-plugin/
You say they are going to ‘open their APIs’ - but at the moment you have to ask them for access and tell them what sort of widget you are interested in making. Then they will ‘review’ your ‘application’ and get back to you. Looks like some sort of filtering going on - which is not exactly ‘open’.
That’s funny because WordPress just launched their widgets too!
Widgets are a great way to enable site/blog owners to extend their websites with arbitrary functionality (equivalent to an API for a website). In our WebAssemblyLine™ (http://www.webassemblyline.com/) website lifecycle management system we let users extend their website with ANY widgets they choose. The only requirement is they have to be written in PHP. Once a widget is written and added to the CMS it can be placed on any page of the website with a click of a button.
Another thing about TypePad widgets - you can’t use them if you use an Advanced Template. Seems the sort of people who may want to use widgets are the sort of people who will have gone to Advanced Templates - which allows you to add widgets anyway (albeit in the raw html). So, revert to normal Templates or don’t use Widgets - your choice!
Since when can’t people just code themselves.
Nice. I really like the idea of widgets because there’s loads of little ‘bits’ of code out there and, although it isn’t hard to copy and paste them in, it’s a lot nicer just to ‘activate’ them and move them to where you want.
I actually implemented a widget system into the blogging engine I released a month or so ago. Not as developed as these major blogging engines though so it’s good to see widgets being incoporated into Wordpress and such.
“You say they are going to ‘open their APIs’ - but at the moment you have to ask them for access and tell them what sort of widget you are interested in making. Then they will ‘review’ your ‘application’ and get back to you.”
Right now we want to make sure the experience is perfectly smooth as we launch the new feature, and that there’s no concerns about reliability or security with the widgets. We’ve had open APIs for TypeLists and creating posts for years, and our Atom support is completely unfettered (including for creating sidebar Notes) so there’s plenty of options if you want to send data into TypePad without going through the review process that we have in place right now.
“Seems the sort of people who may want to use widgets are the sort of people who will have gone to Advanced Templates - which allows you to add widgets anyway (albeit in the raw html).”
Most of our users who are on advanced templates are comfortable enough with HTML that they feel like they’d do this sort of integration themselves, but by all means we hope users who only went to advanced templates to add this sort of functionality will be able to use widgets instead and not have to much with code.
Basically, the milestone here is about being open enough to have dozens of partners contributing widgets; TypePad’s always had the ability to drag and drop simple sidebar elements like a list of your recent posts. Those things have been around for years — much more interesting is connecting to all the other services and sites you use, and that’s frankly what I’m most excited about.
Eurekster is very excited by this as well. It will simplify the implementation of swickis on sites such as this [see swicki buzzcloud on the top right hand side of this page].
The typo weblog system has had widgets for a while now:
http://www.typosphere.org/
WOOT!
How about a widget that allows for pagination? In the year 2006, it is hard to believe that unlike virtually all other blog solutions out there, Typepad offers no way to place a simple next button at the bottom of the screen. Surely this is more important than having ClubMom seemlessly integrate into a blog.
I’d just like to thank Anil for calmly answering my questions and being informative and reasonable and not rising to my bait! Thanks. Though I’d still like a way to use Widgets in my Advanced Templates without having to reverse out - as there are things in your widgets that aren’t available elsewhere.
Thr Turkish blog sysyem http://www.gaxxi.com has planning in the same time with typepad and wordpress their own widget system to..
it’s funny…
Blogging has definitely changed my life. I was amazed at how quickly the feeling of community came through. I’ve met some great “strangers” on line. I’ve learned from them and been encouraged by them. And spent way too much money on amazon reading the books they recommend.
Is typepad in business? Everything is shut down. Typepad. Sixapart. My blog is down.
i will certainly take a closer look at both Typepad & Wordpress Widgets!
& i was just getting the hang of that on Blogger!
altho the rigamaroll & frustration of “simply” adding links to my blog template was beyond belief hence their “stinky linky’s” handle & by no means any offence to thee cool peeps i’ve started linking too!!
why in gods name would Blogger even offer a template that didn’t even have a section for Links or a BlogRoll??
that seems like something that should just be a given!
what Typepad & Wordpress are doing to make these Cool Widgets added as easily as possible to Everybody’s Blogs is to be Highly applauded!
Bravo!! ;))
Wordpress has less widgets then typepad but the speed of wordpress is better than typepad. Feature wise typepad is better and performance wise wordpress is the best.
Here’s one you guys all missed. Znitch.com adds a blog widget that sms or email notifies your readers with filtering for new blog posts.
That’s funny because WordPress just launched their widgets too! Thank you.
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