Sports Embed test

testing new player embed code

Yet another test

Another test

New VMIX embed test

Testing embed now

Video Player Embed Code Test

VMIX test

Testing how VMIX counts view statistics:

Mom's Widget + Clearspring

This is a test of using the Moms Miami widget with Clearspring. It appears there's no drop shadow allowed on html (vs. flash) widgets.

Testing New Clearspring Config

This one has an HTML wrapper.

More drink recipes from Clink!

Testing VMIX video embed

Testing Clearspring, 1 2 3

I set up the Clink! widget in Clearspring, and posted it to my Faccebook account. Now I'm reposting it from there to here.

Dave Barry Widget

The latest in the series:



This one took some extra work to keep it looking nice. The flash textarea component can only interpret a subset of the html tags the newsroom uses, so I had to manually strip out certain characters. It would make sense to propagate that part of the code into the rest of the widgets.

Photo of the Day Widget

Check out my most recent widget. It pulls the latest six Photo of the Day galleries, then displays them in an interactive slideshow. You can go full screen by clicking in the lower right corner.



This was a pretty straight-forward integration of SlideShowPro and our existing XML feeds. The tricky part was consolidating the most recent feeds into an OPML format that SSP could interpret, which I did manually by creating a new template inside pubsys. That gives the functionality of multiple days being seen as independent albums, and staying up to date with the most recent week's worth of photos.

Clink! Widget

I put together a new widget - this time featuring content from Miami.com's Clink! section.

This widget features drink recipes and other booze-related news... how could you go wrong?



Update: Kate fixed the RSS feed and everything is good to go!

Twittered out

318 Tweets later, the Draft is over and so is our initial Twitter experiment. We got 39 followers - not the 100 we wanted, but it's a start.

What's next? We'll probably hook up some of our RSS feeds to Twitter, so that Breaking News items are automatically broadcast.

Follow the Miami Herald on Twitter for future experiments.

Show me your widget

One of my projects at the Herald is creating 'widgets'. After I finished my first prototype, I asked my girlfriend Allie, "Do you want to see my widget?" Judging from her reaction, there's a lot of confusion regarding the term widget.

A widget is a little piece of a website that can be moved around, and even posted on another site. So imagine a tiny, portable version of a web page. You can see the first one I did below, which pulls the Breaking News headlines from the Herald's site.

This is a very simple example. Other widgets I'm working on include: Dolphins Central (including Dolphins news, blog posts, and podcasts), Clink (including new drink recipes), Photos of the Day, and a Dave Barry widget.

Twitter-riffic

So word came down from the newsroom that they want to 'play' with this new technology called Twitter. One idea is that it could be a good tool for reporting via text message during a hurricane. Another thing is that other newspapers are using it, and we just want to experiment.

I've been using Twitter for a while, to make my online status updates easier. I have a number of profiles online - facebook, myspace, my personal website - and I've rigged it so that they pull in feeds from Twitter, allowing me to update multiple sites at once.

I knocked together a quick module for Pubsys (our CMS) that will pull in our Twitter feed and display it wherever we want on MiamiHerald.com. Our first experiment will be for the NFL draft this weekend, with sports reporter Dave Lopez taking charge of the posts.

One of the challenges with this project is that Twitter is a notoriously flaky site. That is, it goes down quite a bit. Therefore, we don't want to rely on their feed, as it could hang our entire page. I separated the code into two modules - a placeholder, and a retriever. This lets us load the twitter feed last, so that in case they go offline, it doesn't effect our page too much. I also experimented with caching the twitter feed, but since it creates a delay in the flow of information, we decided to abandon this approach for now.