Beth Granter

Freelance digital consultant for charities


Custom size del.icio.us Widgetbox widget for Ning (and others)


So I made a custom size del.icio.us Widgetbox widget for my Ning profiles, but Widgetbox won’t put it in their gallery because the links don’t open in a new window. I added the code they provide to make it do this but it appears not to work. I think because the links are being created by the del.icio.us javascript rather than already being in the widget. Does anyone know how to fix this? The other del.icio.us tagroll widget must have managed it because it’s in the Widgetbox gallery, but you can’t resize that one on Ning. Here’s my code:

<script>
	var i;
	var aTags = document.getElementsByTagName(“a”);
	for (i=0; i < aTags.length; i++) {
		aTags[i].setAttribute(“target”, “_new”);
	}

	var areaTags = document.getElementsByTagName(“area”);
	for (i=0; i < areaTags.length; i++) {
		areaTags[i].setAttribute(“target”, “_new”);
	}
</script>
<div style="padding:7px;font-family:Arial;
width:${config.width}px;">
  <script type="text/javascript"
src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/tags/${config.username}
?count=${config.number};
size=${config.minimum}-${config.maximum};
color=${config.little-colour}-${config.big-colour};
title=${config.title};name">
</script>
  </div>
_____________________________EDIT___________________________

Solution! OK so I wrote to Widgetbox support eventually and they’ve helped loads.  They’ve now added a ‘code snippet’ inserter into the widget code editor which adds the correct code for making links open in a new window.  Apparently the problem was with copy-pasting the code into my widget made the quotes into speech marks  rather than those code type straight quotes.  So now that’s fixed.  BUT sometime in the last week the actual widget itself has broken on Ning.  The widget is fine on Widgetbox, but even the ‘add to Ning’ option has disappeared.  I can’t find an ‘add to Ning’ option on any of the other widgets either so I wonder if Ning has changed something and become incompatible?  Anyway, I’ve asked Widgetbox about this again so bear with me and I’ll let you know what they say…


2 responses to “Custom size del.icio.us Widgetbox widget for Ning (and others)”

  1. Hi Beth,
    sorry to hear about your frustation with the OpenSocial Widgets. Perhaps you may want to drop into WidgetLaboratory and take advantage of any of our Widgets and Solutions built specifically for the Ning platform? Everything from Instant Message, Chat, Who’s Online, to full CMS, Ad Manager, Member Map, Video/Photo/Music Browsers, etc.

    Our toolkit is designed for those Ning site creators (and members) who find the ease-of-use of Ning to be compelling, yet do not otherwise with to build their own custom solutions. Since all of our goodies run native to Ning, you would likely not experience any of the hiccups described above.

    We have tools that will allow you migrate your data in and out and between your Ning site and other traditional sites (blogs and hosted soutions).

    Give us a quick browse for your Ning site and beyond…

    Thanks!
    EG
    WidgetLaboratory.com

  2. Widgetbox Support have just informed me that, “Currently, because of some changes to Ning’s OpenSocial implementation, we removed Ning as a supported platform. We’ll be adding support again when we can make the required changes to add support in the future.”

    Hopefully this will be soon! Damn, my first widget and now it’s broken on Ning 🙁

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