One of my favorite things about joining a new project is learning about features you didn’t know existed.
For example, last week our developer lead gave me an in-depth guided tour of the Ohloh feature set. One of the features that surprised me were the Ohloh widgets. I knew there were project widgets, but I didn’t know there were other types.
In case you are looking for more ways to promote your project, your involvement in a project, or your project team, you might want to check out these different types of widgets.
There are 3 basic types of widgets.
Project widgets – http://www.ohloh.net/p/PROJECT_NAME/widgets
People widgets – http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/USERNAME/widgets
Stack widgets – http://www.ohloh.net/stacks/STACK_NUMBER/widgets
Project widgets
The project widgets allow you to encourage others to use the project or embed popular statistics about the project on your blog or iGoogle page.
Go to any project, like Firebug for example, and navigate to the bottom right to the Widgets area. You can click on anywhere in the gray box to navigate to the Firebug widgets page.
You’ll now see many different widgets for you to choose from, ranging from “I use it” smaller styles
to larger statistical widgets.
People Widgets
People widgets allow you to show your Kudos score and/or your Ohloh profile. You could also use these widgets to list members of your project.
Go to any user’s account like Stefan Kung and navigate to the bottom right to the Widgets section.
You’ll see a few choices for widgets, from a simple profile to a detailed kudos view.
Stack Widgets
From the Ohloh FAQ, a stack is a set of programs that are combined to make up a software system. It’s up to you what you put into you different stacks. Stack widgets allow you to list what projects you have in each of your stacks.
For example, in my account there is My Stacks under Summary. Once selected, my stacks are shown. To view the embed code, click on the Embed link under the tools.
You can now customize how your stack widget looks on the Widgets for Tools page.
Embedding it all together
Over on my blog, I have a section in the navigation that displays the different types of widgets.
I really enjoy writing “how-to” posts, so please let me know what topics I should write about next!
