steal this widget

September 19, 2003

With a little help from Peter Andrea for the art, additional borrowed code and inspired naming from Mark Davis and a few extra lines of my own…. you can now check out the code for the link browser by simply clicking on “view source” in the top-right.

The widget uses Laszlo’s “Tab Slider” component, a UI element that pre-dates Macromedia’s Accordian Pane which offers that same functionality. The URL for the XML data file (in OPML format) is passed as a parameter to the application. One of the features of the Laszlo Presentation Server is that it auto-magically fetches the file from a remote site. You don’t have to worry about cross-domain scenarios because the SWF and its data end up being served by the same server (LPS). This should clarify some questions from JD’s post.

Now its easy to steal the code for the widget if you happen to already by running LPS like Mark or me. For those who aren’t yet, I would like to make it so its easy to steal the widget as an HTML snippet like Marc did. For now its not for the timid, but feel free to view source in your web browser menu and grab the embed/object tag and add your own colors and opml file for your page.

---