BYBLACK DUCK

New! Account Widgets

By on June 1, 2007 in blog

As part of our effort to create more embeddable content, we’ve created widgets for accounts. Here’s a sample:

account badge

The example is one of my widgets (no jokes about my lame stats please).

We also have 2 other widgets, which are smaller. You can check out all the available badges by going to the account widgets page; click the sidebar on the bottom right of your profile page to check out widgets created for you.

I’d love feedback from you about the badges. Are they:
* the right size?
* are there other stats that we expose in the account pages that you’d like to see in these badges?

Please leave feedback on this thread.

About andy

View all posts by andy →
  • http://www.public.asu.edu/~bnickel bnickel (Brian Nickel)

    The rank widget is broken for me. The image path is relative instead of absolute.

    Otherwise, awesome!

  • http://www.insidejobs.com andy (Andy Verprauskus)

    Thanks for finding that Brian. It should be fixed now.

  • http://nitens.org dartar (dartar)

    I assumed the widgets would be about code metrics, not kudos.

  • robin (Robin Luckey)

    Hi dartar,

    We’re happy to create more widgets. What exactly are you looking for? What stats you like to see on a widget? What form factor?

  • Levia (Lars Wesselius)

    I really like the new widgets. Great job, altough, forum/site signatures dont accept Javascript. Isnt there some way to make those widgets available via a accepted way?

  • http://www.insidejobs.com andy (Andy Verprauskus)

    Hi Levia,

    Thanks for pointing this out. We spent a while today discussing this and will likely address it soon.

    Quick question: Do the forums and site signatures you use allow you to include an image wrapped by a link? Any other specific suggestions for supporting forums?

  • Levia (Lars Wesselius)

    Hey Andy,

    Im not sure what you mean – do you mean that the link can contain a page and not directly a image where the page generates an image or something? If that is so, I guess they do. It are mostly forums like PHPBB, and blogs im talking about.

    Another way could be done by actually generating a image every once in a while. I dont know how hard this is though, I do not have very much knowledge about this in general.

  • http://nitens.org dartar (dartar)

    I was thinking of widgets displaying developer activity per project like those displayed on the contributors page or under profile > open source contributions.

  • http://www.insidejobs.com andy (Andy Verprauskus)

    @Levia: Something like <a href='foo'><img src='bar'></a>

    where foo and bar were replaced as appropriate.

  • http://www.public.asu.edu/~bnickel bnickel (Brian Nickel)

    The image wrapped in a link would also be helpful when the server is running slow. JavaScript is executed at the point it appears in a web page, so the page stops rendering when it encounters the widget and won’t resume until it’s completed its transaction with the server. An image, especially one with a specified width and height, would yield better results.

  • Levia (Lars Wesselius)

    Andy: Im pretty sure that will work, as long as its done in BBcode since html isnt (mostly) not accepted either. but that doesnt matter I suppose, you can wrap your example in BB code aswell. so go for it i’d say :)

  • http://www.insidejobs.com andy (Andy Verprauskus)

    I’ll try to whip up a BBCode example too. Thanks for the pointer!

  • http://www.insidejobs.com andy (Andy Verprauskus)

    Does this BBCode work?

    [URL=http://0.0.0.0:3000/accounts/776?ref=Tiny][IMG=/images/icons/ohloh_profile.png][/URL]

    Naturally, replace 776 with the account number you want to use.

  • Levia (Lars Wesselius)

    Tested, changed it to
    [URL=http://0.0.0.0:3000/accounts/776?ref=Tiny][IMG]/images/icons/ohlohprofile.png[/img][/URL]
    as some forums require that but its the same, and it doesnt work. Obviously, as how can http://0.0.0.0 work :)
    Besides, using [IMG]/anyfolder[/IMG] accesses anyfolder on the server your executing the bbcode from. However, this can actually work. A direct link to the profile image, if it would be accessible, would simply work.
    so:
    [url=http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/739][img]direct    linktoimage[/img][/url]
    can work. As long as there is a direct link to the image.

    edit:

    which would be this:
    [url=http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/739][img]http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/739/widgets/account_detailed.gif[/img][/url]

    Which works. Wonder what happens when it updates though ;P

  • http://www.insidejobs.com andy (Andy Verprauskus)

    Thanks for quick response Levia. Sorry about the somewhat dopey post — yes 0.0.0.0:3000 is my test address, it’s also why my url is relative.

    To confirm,
    * lowercase url and img are preferred?
    * change [img=foo] to [img]foo[/img]?

  • Levia (Lars Wesselius)

    No problem :) and thank you too. url and img can be lowercase or uppercase, as long as their values are valid

    and yes, I would do that. Most parsers use the second one. You could also show both as example.

  • http://www.insidejobs.com andy (Andy Verprauskus)

    Thanks for all the feedback everyone. The new page is up with straight HTML (no javascript) and also shows BBCode. Again, this is my page, so navigate to your own page before copying the links.

    Please let me know if you have any other suggestions or feedback.

    @Levia — for now, I’ll just list one form of the BBCode, dont want to make the page too busy – thanks for all the suggestions

  • Levia (Lars Wesselius)

    Great Andy, thanks :) Good job :D