Test Our New Widget
Paul Stamatiou, 12:56 pm, 27 Oct 2008The Skribit widget has remained largely unchanged – at least from the external point of view – for several months. The reason? We’ve been working on something much better! Today our new widget is open for test drives so you guys can help us find any bugs and share your feedback with us. Here’s the low down: the new widget doesn’t use an iframe and as such, you can style it however you like with your own CSS. It also weighs only 4.6KB so it won’t affect your website’s loading time, as compared to our old widget which included a hefty JavaScript library.
The new Skribit widget customized on PaulStamatiou.com (left) and blog.codeeg.com (right)
Additionally, there are some notable usability improvements. When you click the title text (“What Should I Write About” in these examples) in the textbox, it moves down and lets you type your suggestion directly in there – as opposed to flipping to a new screen and hiding the current suggestions.
As mentioned, we are currently beta testing the new widget. You can give it a whirl by either checking it out on our blogs (Paul, Calvin), or installing it yourself with our new WordPress plugin. The plugin helps install the widget on WordPress blogs using widgetized themes. If your theme doesn’t support WP widgets, drop us a line and we’ll provide you with the code snippet to manually install it on your blog.
As usual, feel free to provide us with any comments, suggestions or feedback on our Get Satisfaction page.
[...] has all of the abilities of the regular sidebar widget, which was also recently updated, of listing popular suggestions, the ability to vote on them as well as submitting a suggestion, [...]
What’s Going On With Skribit? - PaulStamatiou.com, November 10th, 2008 at 2:53 amHi Paul – great to see you using Get Satisfaction too! I like its robust set of tools.
Your new widget looks appealing as well – I have the GS widget running on my Joomla site (other than the Welcome page – can’t figure that out yet) & I’d like to run your new widget too as a Suggestions tool like it’s intended – to get content suggestions for what I should be writing about!
I do have several other “blogs” on my site in the Joomla sense so maybe I can use your widget selectively there?
I have a module in Joomla that let’s me configure which pages it goes on. So the embed code gets placed uniquely as an html snippet in a new occurrence of the module & then I say which page it shows up on.
If you notice I had another “Open” button on the page (to allow users to get to other content pages on the site) so I had to tailor where the GS Feedback button initially positioned itself too – so I’ll need that for yours too please.
Thanks for all the great work – saw your work at the Startup Weekend session – that;s where I saw that you had done the new widget!
We had met briefly at Startup Riot if you happen to remember!
Hope all is well,
Marvin
Marvin Heery, November 15th, 2008 at 10:58 pmI was going to test the new widget, but my blog does not support the widget in the sidebar, so I need the code snippet to manually install it where I want.
David Warner, January 7th, 2009 at 10:52 amHi David – I’ve just emailed you your code.
Paul Stamatiou, January 7th, 2009 at 10:56 am