RSS Awareness Day

Today is the RSS Awareness Day. Don’t miss one of our RSS feeds:

• New Widgets
• Updates Widgets
• Top Widgets
• Featured Widgets

And don’t forget to check our RSS widget which makes it easy to read your RSS feeds on your Widgetop Desktop or the iPhone.

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RSS Feeds on Mobile Widgetop

While it is already much easier to add RSS news feeds to your Widgetop desktop we make it much simpler for the mobile and iPhone version of Widgetop as well.

Tap the Add Widget Icon then click the new RSS Icon to open the new Add News Feeds page:

Same as on the desktop version you can search for feeds by keyword or add feeds by their URL.

Adding RSS Feeds to Widgetop

There is lots of valuable information available as RSS feeds. Therefore we decided to make the adding of news feeds to the widgetop desktop a lot easier. Just open Add Widget and go to the new RSS Feeds tab:

Here you can either:

• enter the URL of a RSS feed
• enter the URL of a web site which feed you want to subscribe
• search for feeds by keyword

This will add the new RSS Feed widget with the selected feed to your desktop:

Share your Widget Desktop

You might have seen the new Desktops and Sharing menus already:

We are happy to announce that we added a new feature to Widgetop. Now you can share your desktop and let your friends or even anybody else access it and see your widgets. Of course your settings are safe because a shared desktop can’t be modified by the viewers, only by yourself.

How to share your desktop:

1. You need to sign in to your desktop (or create an account if you don’t have already) because you can only share your personal desktop.
2. Click the Sharing menu (with you current sharing status) and click the Share button.
3. Enter the title, the description and whether you want to share your desktop privately or publicly. A public desktop is included in our desktops directory and can be found by searching for title and description. A private desktop is only accessible by knowing its unique desktop id. and can be further protected by an optional password.
4. Press Save and you can see the links to your shared page on the overview screen.

A shared desktop can be opened read only by this URL:

http://www.widgetop.com/shared.html?page=<desktop_id>

or as the modifiable start desktop by this URL:

http://www.widgetop.com?page=<desktop_id>

Here is the URL of the default desktop (desktop_id = default):

http://www.widgetop.com/shared.html?page=default

By clicking the Desktops menu you can open the directory of publically shared pages:

Similar to our widgets gallery you can find the newest and most popular desktops, access them alphabetically by title or search them by title and description.

Happy Sharing and impress us and all other Widgetop users with your widget desktops!

Found on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SZkuk-blOM

New RSS Feed: Top Widgets

In addition to our existing RSS feeds for new, updated and featured widgets you can now subscribe to our:

Top Widgets RSS Feed.
http://www.widgetop.com/rss/top.rss.

It is compiled out of the most used widgets by all registered users and updated once a day. You can check it out yourself on the Widgetop desktop with our Widgetop widget.

Please see our syndication page for more details.

External links to add Yourminis Widgets

You can link to the desktop and open our Universal YourMinis Widget with any widget from the YourMinis directory.

How To

(from our syndication page)

Link to the Widgetop desktop http://www.widgetop.com and add the URL parameter ?addYourMini=[WidgetURL] where the [WidgetURL] parameter denotes the URL to the Widget you want to add. Just go to the YourMinis directory, select the widget you want, press the Copy Me button, copy the code and replace [WidgetURL] in the URL.

Hint: make sure you escape your URL parameter properly.

Example

This link will open your desktop with the Yourminis YouTube widget.

Of course you can use one of our buttons instead of a plain link.

Yourminis widgets on Widgetop

Yourminis widgets can now be converted to run directly on either Widgetop web desktop or Apple Dashboard. Our new universal Yourminis Widget (download) enables the use of any widget you like from Yourminis catalog.

How to put Yourminis widgets on your desktop:

Just go to the YourMinis directory, select the widget you want, press the Copy Me button (which copies the code to the clipboard) paste it into the code field on the new Add Yourminis section on the desktop.

Example

For this Yourminis Youtube widget just copy:

<embed pluginspage=”http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer&#8221; src=”http://www.yourminis.com/Dir/GetContainer.api?uri=yourminis/yourminis/mini:youtube&#8221; FlashVars=”height=270&xheight=280&xwidth=370&width=360&uri=yourminis%2Fyourminis%2Fmini%3Ayoutube&swfurl=%2Fwidget%5Fyoutube%2Eswf&” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowScriptAccess=”always” wmode=”transparent” width=”370″ height=”280″></embed>

Link to your widgets

We added another syndication option. When you open our gallery you can see a new syndication section in the widget info with the links to open the widget on the desktop or in the gallery.

You can use these links to hightlight either your own little widget or any other widget you like from your own web site.

If you can’t find what you look for

Despite the large number of widgets in our widget gallery it might happen that you can’t find the widget which does what you have been looking for. There is no need to give up then you have several options:

1. Check if one of our generic widgets like the RSS widget for news feeds, the Picture Frame widget for images, web cams or weather radars might do the job.
2. Check the Google Gadget directory if there is a Google Gadget which does what you look for. Adding Google Gadgets to your Widgetop desktop is very easy.
3. With the help of our Universal widget you can easily turn content from almost any web page into a widget. Just type the URL, scroll to the part of the page you want to watch, adapt the size and lock the widget. It can even auto-refresh it’s content.
4. Check Apples Dashboard widget catalog if you can find what you want there. If that widget isn’t available on Widgetop ask the widget author to upload his widget to Widgetop or tell us and we will do it.
5. Last but not least, consider creating your own Dashboard widget. It’s easier than you might think and there are great tools like Apples DashCode: Easy to use and filled with rich and customizable widget templates, so you don’t have to be a programmer. Make sure you register as a developer on Widgetop and upload your great new widget so that other users can see and use it. If we find it as useful as you there is a good chance that it will be promoted as one of our featured widgets.