Feature Spotlight: Seeding your Widget
It’s pretty clear how to get your widget into the Clearspring platform, but once it’s there, how do you send it out across the web? This post is a slightly more in-depth version of what’s currently in the documentation, we’ll update that in the next few days.
You have several options for getting your widget out into the world, and it all starts with one or more seeding points — locations that you set up and from which initial users can obtain your widget. All Clearspring-enabled widgets get the viral sharing options (via the dock that sits below your widget and the menu that it pops up), so the idea is that once the widget is initially seeded, users will then be able to get it from existing instances, without having to go back to a central seeding point. Of course, if you are a site developer or owner and want to allow users to obtain your widget from your own site, you can do that as well.
Clearspring is a super-scalable back-end distribution infrastructure and API set, not a widget gallery, so we’d rather offer you ways to help you get your widgets wherever you want them, whether that be to a widget gallery or to some other type of seeding point.
The Clearspring Widget Homepage
Each and every Clearspring-enabled widget can be given a default homepage on the Clearspring site, from which users can grab the widget. You can hand out links to this page however you want. Soon (real soon), some gallery syndication partners and indexing search engines will even suck your widget in from this page.
It’s up to you whether or not your widget has a public homepage, you can set this from within the Widget Console, in the Share it -> Widget homepage tool.
Using your Widget’s Code
The most low-tech way to seed your widget from a site or page of your own is to just include the Clearspring-enabled widget there. Users visiting the appropriate page on your site will see your widget, and can use the standard dock to get it for themselves, wherever they want it.
You can get the code to include on your page from the Widget Console, in the Share it -> Get the code tool.
Gallery Publication
If you want to allow your widget to be visible in various external Widget Galleries, Clearspring can help you there as well. You can use the Widget Console’s Share it -> Publish to galleries tool to publish your widget into the leading galleries. Putting your widget into any of these galleries doesn’t change the fact that you’re widget will have all the Clearspring features, but it will also be visible to users of those gallery sites. For widgets that don’t need a tremendous amount of context and make sense to be distributed outside of your own website, the gallery publication option is a great one.
Using the Placement API
If you are distributing your widget from your own website, and want to be able to hand visitors code snippets that they can use to embed your widget, you can actually generate these using our Placement API. The API lets you ask the Clearspring system for code snippets for specific configurations of specific widgets. This is a powerful mechanism for sites that want greater control of the user experience of giving code to users.
Wrapping Up
Taking these options together, Clearspring gives you a number of powerful ways to distribute your widgets across the web, and you should be able to find one that matches your target use case. If not, or if you have any other perspective to share, feel free to let us know in the forums.
Until next time…
