OpenLinkz

This post is to announce our newest widget, OpenAdSlider. This is a sliding panel that can contain an advertisement, banner ad, text links or any other message or image. The panel slides up from the bottom of the browser window and stops as soon as it is fully displayed. This means it does not float across the entire page getting in the way of your content.

This ad panel will not be blocked by pop-up blockers. It is a DIV within the page and, as such, it can house Google AdSense ads that are contextually in synch with your page content.

We have provided a free web-based wizard on the OpenLinkz homepage so you can generate the style sheet, HTML and Javascript necessary to implement the sliding ad panel. You can customize the height of the panel, the background color and the font color. You can plug in any ad code, HTML, Javascript or image code you wish by pasting it into a text box.

If you are worried about overdoing it with sliding ads, you can choose whether you want the ad to display on every page view or only on the first page view of the user's session. Indeed, that is how we have it configured on this blog. In either case, the user can easily close the panel and it will slide out of sight.

We have decided to provide this wizard free of charge. Most other sites require you to pay for a downloaded code generator. Costs range from around $20 all the way up to $125.

We think this sliding ad panel helps you get your advertising message displayed above the fold without being too obtrusive. The sliding action immediately draws the user's eye to the ad content. Try it on the OpenLinkz homepage and see what you think!

In my work to maintain a widget that retrieves stock quote data continuously throughout the day I have ended up experimenting with several different approaches.

As discussed in my last post, WidgetBox on its own will not provide the required functionality so we migrated to Google gadgets. In working with the Google gadget libraries, I initially used their XML-HTTP request as a work-around by preventing the test for an XML structure in the response. Eventually, I found that this approach was actually not as reliable as I had hoped. In looking for an alternative, I found that Google also had a function that retrieves simple text data across domains.

Since the raw stock quote data from Yahoo! is CSV text, this text retrieval function turns out to be the most efficient in terms of speed, being light weight and, most importantly, will run continuously and reliably as long as a user is viewing the page, even if it's all day.

The Google gadget libraries are clearly more flexible and provide someone willing to dig through the documentation greater control and power over the functionality within a widget/gadget.

I recently wrote about WidgetBox breaking my live stock quote widget by disallowing data in CSV text format when using their proxied XML-HTTP request functionality. (See "WidgetBox tightens up AJAX interface")

As an alternative, I set up a Yahoo! pipe to supply the data in RSS format, which seemed to work well.

The problem is when a person stays on the page hosting the widget in order to watch the quotes update throughput the day. After half an hour or so, the widget stops working. There appears to be some kind of strange caching going on that prevents any data from being returned. I tried the usual work-around: appending in the query string a key/value pair containing a random number but to no avail.

My eventual solution was to create a Google gadget with the same logic that retrieved data from the original source in CSV text format. This gadget was then embedded inside the WidgetBox widget.

With a little fooling around, I was able to pass the user configuration data through the WidgetBox widget to the Google widget and, once again, things seem to be working fine.

The bottom line is that RSS just does not seem to lend itself to continuous data retrieval for applications like real-time quotes. It is hard to be sure exactly where the problem lies but either WidgetBox or Yahoo! or both treat RSS as an information feed, not a raw data feed. As such, the assumption is that one wouldn't want to continuously retrieve an RSS feed as I have been trying to do.

So far, it appears the Google libraries offer more flexibility than the WidgetBox approach but at the cost of more programming effort. For those with good Javascript expertise, however, programming gadgets should not be too hard.