Category: Technology

What’s Next ? Widget ?

It all started from a very simple idea … put up something nifty in the sidebar of my blog. Of course, it is easy to put up Google adsense, Amazon Omakase, RSS etc … but what about something better, something easier to manage (in my blog) ? Like widgets ?

Since the good old days of Windows Active Desktop, Apple Dashboard, and Yahoo Konfabulator, widgets are really not new stuff. But we now have Vista sidebar gadgets, and after Newsweek declared 2007 is the year of widget, I am sure we will see a lot more about widgets.

However, what really really really caught my eye is the following blog post:

If you were going to invent the portal today, would you?

Just some excerpt …

My point is that all content needs to be loosed in the smallest particles possible (widgetised) – then it will reform itself into valid and relevant units, driven by the consumers of that content. One unspoken issue underlying this is the concept of ‘portal death’.

Check that blog post, check out the concept behind widget and widget sites like widgetbox.com … widget is going to change the Internet and the world again.

How To – Lightbox

Well well it may sound easy to implement the Lightbox photo album, but of course I think you all don’t mind some bits of the implementation details:

  1. First, download the Lightbox Javascript, unzip it, upload to your server …
  2. In the Lightbox /js/ directory, check the file lightbox.js, search the Configuration section. Ensure the paths to the two images are correct.
  3. In the Lightbox /css/ directory, check the file lightbox.css, ensure the paths to the image files are correct.
  4. Now back to the blog tool, find out the tiny-mce-xxx.js (xxx is your blog tool), probably in the js directory, and make sure the “a” element (i.e. the anchor tag) includes “rel” (i.e. the relationship attribute) in the line of extended_valid_elements. That change make the tinymce accepts “rel” in anchor tag (by default, tinymce will remove this attribute).
  5. Then, amend the template of your blog (in my case, the header.template) to include the few script tags and link tag (as specified in the Lightbox help page). That change includes extra js files to your blog pages – i.e. it will essentially slow down all the pages … sorry.
  6. Last step, create your blog post as usual, but don’t forget to include the “rel” attribute in the anchor tag, as in the Lightbox help page.

That’s it !!