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.