Everyone is wild for widgets, or so they tell me. Here is one we just finished up at work:



This ties into a new page we call Brightcove Takeout. Its basically a whole bunch of RSS feeds from different areas of the site. In addition to getting the RSS feed, you can grab a widget powered by the feed (Takeout boxes). The one I posted here is powered by a feed of my most recent video uploads. Pretty neat.

Labels: brightcove, internet, Video, widget

The BBQ Blog returns! For those unfamiliar with its virtual meaty goodness, The BBQ Blog is a project I had during the final years of art school. My good buddy Matt and I would blog about grilling, post recipes, etc. Apparently some people actually found it semi-useful, unlike most of the stuff I contribute to the internet.

bbq.nattarbox.com

Eventually it came to a halt when the Brookline fire department got sick of seeing clouds of mesquite smoke wafting off the roof of my apartment building. The grill disappeared one day and a notice regarding the illegality and general lack of common sense relating to open fires on rooftops was slipped under my door. We continued grilling occasionally, but the blog began to languish.

Today we're bringing it back, primarily as an excuse for me to learn XHTML (transitional, I'm not that crazy yet) and CSS. I've been putting off this step far longer than anyone who works as an interactive designer should, relying on the hacked up HTML I learned in the roaring '90s. Armed with the written support of Zeldman I'm slowly taking the blog back online. So far I haven't spent much time on the design, intending to keep it fairly similar to the previous. Right now its pretty ugly as I'm mostly just getting the Blogger tags in place, but once the framework is in place and working I'll put a pretty face on the 'ol girl.

Also a lot of the content needs updating, especially in the photo deparment since the demise of my previous host. I've started transitioning photos over to Flickr, where hopefully they will enjoy a permenant home.

Labels: bbq, Blogging, internet

The seven or eight people who occasionally read this blog should all vote for The Closet as Boston's best consignment store! Just click the vote button below the photo.

Labels: boston, fashion, internet

Cassie and I had some great tickets to the Red Sox game last night. It was an awesome game, despite Dice K's chokage in the first inning. On a related note, my old cell phone has the most useless camera ever. I finally figured out how to send photos from it to Flickr, but that quality makes it an exercise in futility.

Labels: baseball, boston, red sox

This is a Flash widget that is distributed by a site called yourminis.com and is capable of accessing the Brightcove site to pull down content of your choice. I have this one configured to do a search for the term 'nat' on Brightcove and return the results. It can also be setup to use a category RSS feed to show the newest video in the Music category or something similar.

I'm a little skeptical of the amount of hype associated with widgets, mostly because they generally seem to be useless eye candy shoved into the side column of a blog I'll never look at again. This particular widget however provides a lot of functionality and customizable behavior in a slick little interface.

Update:
A site I've always liked, The International Herald Tribune, has started using one of these widgets in their Style section. Take a look!

Labels: brightcove, Video, widget