New Widget for Showing off your Articles

[jrichards]

We've just released a small new feature today, it's the Constant-Content Widget for Authors. It's a little something that we cooked up to give you a tool to help others keep up to date on the articles that you have been writing.

The idea is to give you a piece of code that will be easy to put on any sites that you may have to automatically show off the latest articles that you've listed on CC.

So, if you've got a website and you're intersted to advertise your articles login to the main site and visit http://www.constant-content.com/account ... uilder.php and give it a try. When you do get it up and running on your site, please post a link, I'd love to see it!

As with all things related to computers, I'm sure that there will be some wrinkles to iron out as people start giving this a try. So, if you do run into any troubles, please let me know! Either on this thread or by email at support@constant-content.com

I'm going to be working on building this into a wordpress plugin and plugins for other sources so that it will be easier to build into your websites.

-jrichards
Constant-Content.com

[Celeste Stewart]

Cool! I tried it on a squidoo lens and all it did was put a small CC icon that linked to the main page

[RobertaGoli]

Hi there,
The widget looks great on my blog: http://robertagoli.blogspot.com/
I have only just applied to CC and have one article up, I was wondering how many articles the widget will display? Will it just be the very latest one?

Also, I noticed that if you click on the article name, you are directed to my CC article, but if you click on my name, you are directed to a blogger page that says:

Page not found
Sorry, the page you were looking for in the blog The Write Words does not exist.

Any ideas why this might be?
Thanks,
Roberta

[jrichards]

Hi Roberta!

Thanks for pointing the author link issue out. That was a problem on our side. So I've fixed it up now and you're link is now directing people to your profile page as it should!

The widget will display the last 5 articles that you have posted on the site that aren't currently in the 3-day holding period for requests and aren't placed in the private request category. So the widget will grow until it has five articles and then just display the most recent 5 articles after that.

Hi Celeste, I'm just looking into why the widget might not be working on your squidoo lens. I'll get back to you with some more info as soon as I know a little more.

Thanks for trying out the widget,
jrichards

[Celeste Stewart]

It could be a Squidoo thing... that site seems a little finicky about widgets. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

[jrichards]

Hi Celeste,

I just checked out squidoo and it looks like the widget won't be able to work there as they don't allow the <script> html tag in their pages, which is the main driver for the widget. That said it looks like we may be able to develop a module for squidoo. They've got a module development kit and after having a quick look at it, it doesn't seem to difficult to setup. In the mean time, the RSS Feeds that you've got on your lens are doing a pretty similar job. That said, it seems that they strip the links out of those pages, which is makes it a bit harder for potential customers to find and purchase the articles...

So short answer, the widget won't work on squidoo right now, but we may be able to build a module that will provide the same functionality.

-jrichards

[Celeste Stewart]

Don't develop it on my account. I'm not a big Squidoo user. Tried it but it's not for me.

[RobertaGoli]

Hi Roberta!
Thanks for pointing the author link issue out. That was a problem on our side. So I've fixed it up now and you're link is now directing people to your profile page as it should!
jrichards

No problem, the widget is working fine now.
Thanks

[BarryDavidson]

MySpace must have the same problem as Squidoo. All I'm seeing is is a little blue box with "Original Articles" and "constant-content". Of course I think they only disallow/disable javascript.

[Celeste Stewart]

The widget works beautifully with Blogger. Yay! I've created a blog that promotes CC writers and the site in general though at the moment Celeste Stewart is prominently featured - hey it's my blog - with the widget. Eventually I think it would be fun to interview different writers, CC staff members etc... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Just playing around and brainstorming right now. I'm also tying it in with an RSS twitterfeed that I have going out to Twitter.

If you want to see the blog, let me know (it's a young one though, not much there yet). I don't want to be all overly promotional by posting a link though this one is more for explaining the CC site to the world, not necessarily promoting myself.

I am also revamping my website. I hired a real designer this time. We will be including the widget for sure. Thanks again! It's really neat.

[eek]

Yes, please! A blog about CC writers sounds like a good promotional technique, and I'd love to drop in to see it.
Emma

[stephanie]

Just wanted to let you know that I added the widget to my site and blog.

http://www.familylifeabroad.com
and
http://sitesforkids.blogspot.com/

tks!
steph

[jrichards]

Looks great!

I also wanted to mention that Rebecca Mastey has built a Wordpress Plugin http://rebeccamastey.com/wordpress/2009 ... nt-widget/ to easily install the widget into Wordpress Blogs. So if you've got a wordpress blog, check it out!

[Celeste Stewart]

Thanks for the WordPress plugin! It worked great!

[SuzanneBosworth]

Hello all

I thought I'd copy and paste the code for the CC widget, particularly as it looks rather nice with my name and my first article and I've gone all goofy However, off I trot to my Blogger blog and do what you do with code, and what actually shows is a thin blue CC rectangle with the url pointing to CC's main page.

Is there a known issue with the widget or does it not talk to Blogger blogs now? If not I'll just paste it in anyway, but it would have been nice to trumpet having stuff for sale.

Hope someone can shed some light!

Thanks CCites.