Clipmarks WordPress widget now in beta!

2007-01-11

Am I ever thrilled! Eric Goldstein and Eric Skiff of Clipmarks graciously let me know today that a Clipmarks WordPress widget is being beta'd — much better than my prior failed attempt at getting a RSS widget working.

It's especially designed, as you can see (on the right sidebar of my blog), and I've already customized it for my colors. I'll do more tweaking as needed.

What I really like so far:

  • Pretty straightforward to set up. Installation was easy.
     
  • Obviously, saves me the redundancy of duplicating what I said before on Clipmarks — I can just point and link to my clips!
     
  • Customizable colors are a must-have, thanx for adding these.
     
  • Links within remarks work.

Suggestions for moving this beta closer to a ready release:

  • I was confused at first why I couldn't type into the Options' "Clipper" field. Turns out I had to set "Type" to "Enter Clipper".  Wish it had grayed the box out, that would've been a helpful visual cue.
     
  • Perhaps for some people, the option to specify a background image URL — or no background at all — would be useful too.
     
  • "Show Clipper Photo" sounds better as "Show Clipper Photos".
     
  • "Show Clip Info" could allow for different styles, since on mine, default image styling includes a black border: comments pops. Looks odd.
     
  • Inconsistencies between whether it's "ClipmarksWidget" or "Clipmarks Widget" with a space. In the WordPress Options menu, it could simply be called "Clipmarks". :)
     
  • readme.txt is understandable but needs some polish.
     
  • Wish I could put the Clipmarks logo in the green header part of my widget, similar to how RSS widgets have that RSS logo.
     
  • Customizable font and size. (The way it is now is okay for me, but I prefer Verdana over Arial.)

You can see how Eric Skiff is already using it on his blog! Thanx guys, this is really inspiring!

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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

Eric Skiff 2007-01-12 at 7:25 AM UTC

Thanks for the incredible feedback! All of the suggestions are great, and I'm going to get to work right away on this stuff. I'll be in touch later today :)

Thanks again!
-Eric

Funana 2007-01-12 at 12:43 PM UTC

Hey Torley,

I have your Blog's RSS aggregated at my page infopirate.org and read about your problems with the integration of Clipmarks in Worpress.

I'm glad that the guys helped you and that you came up with a lot of improvement ideas. The power of Clipmarks is huge and I am very proud to be a part of it (as a customer). The CM team is allways very helpful and open to new ideas and I think the Wordpress Plugin has to be promoted well when it's ready for it. It is a wonderful way to enhance one's webpage with interesting stuff that matters. I like the folder option which gives you the power to collect clips for different projects and aggregate the RSS, just like I do on my page.

Keep on blogging like you do, it's very interesting and your blog is allways worth to visit!

See you here or at Clipmarks,

Funana

Torley 2007-01-14 at 12:31 PM UTC

Eric, thanx for your latest blog entry too — this back-and-forth is fun!

Funana, I totally agree, and I think it's wonderful the Clipmarks crew are so involved with their creation. It's like they got the ball rolling, and now we're all playing a game of catch. Each time one of us catches the ball, we add something new: a tidbit, a piece of trivia, a scraplet of info, and at this rate, I bet we got those big balls of twine in roadside attractions beat!

Similarly, I'm hoping to find a use for those folders. Many a time I want to grab something and share it with others; Clipmarks certainly has many possibilities in this regard.

Thanx also for aggregating me, I'm gonna check out infopirate.org right now.

Cheerio!

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