Beth Granter

Freelance digital consultant for charities


Adding widgets on my Ning profile page


So I’m a member of a few Ning sites and I really like it.  In trying to edit my profile, I have managed to import my regular blog here into the standard Ning RSS widget.  But you only get one Ning RSS widget.  So for a work-related Ning community like ELESIG, I wanted to show my work blog too.  You get a Ning Text Box widget on your Ning profile which supports embedded widgets from external sites, so I’ve used yourminis RSS widget to import my SPLASH project blog.  yourminis widgets are nice because you can template them really easily to match their destination or leave them in a minimal format.  The only difficult thing here was to get the size right on the yourminis site because you can’t resize them once you’ve embedded them on the destination page.  The next thing I wanted to do was to put a tag cloud of my del.icio.us links on my Ning page.  The standard del.icio.us provided javascript code is stripped from the Ning Text Box widget so that didn’t work.  I couldn’t find a yourminis del.icio.us widget but I found a Widgetbox one.  Again this provides javascript code which is stripped by Ning, but Widgetbox does give you an opensocial URL which should allow you to embed a Widgetbox widget in a Ning site.  But I don’t get what I’m supposed to do with this URL.  Widgetbox says ‘Click the “Copy” button and then paste the url on Ning to add the app”.  OK but where on Ning do I paste it?  I tried the Ning Text Box widget but this just writes the URL out unformatted.  Hmm.  Anybody know how to put a tag cloud of del.icio.us links onto a Ning profile?  Or what I’m supposed to do with the Widgetbox URL for Ning?

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4 responses to “Adding widgets on my Ning profile page”

  1. Ah excellent thanks – I now asked the ELESIG admin to add the open social feature. It would be good if Widgetbox explained that not all Ning sites are compatible when it gives you the URL for Ning. But I guess eventually all Ning sites will be open social compatible. Maybe.

  2. Hi Beth,

    You can only use the open social url if the network owner has added the open social feature; if so there will be a Gadgets tab on the network and a Gadgets box on your profile page in the center column.

    Cheers,
    Phil

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