HOW TO: Make a Widget From Any New York Times Feed. NYTimes.com has launched a Times Widgets platform to let users create custom widgets from the more than 100,000 RSS feeds available.
The widgets can then be embedded on iGoogle, Netvibes, Blogger, Vox, or personal websites and blogs. Here's a quick 3 step rundown of how to make a widget packed with New York Times goodness. It's not exactly rocket science, anyone with a basic understanding of RSS could have managed something similar previously, but it is a short and sweet process to getting a custom view of New York Times content for your site or start page.
Watch out for Page Not Found errors, the platform is still in beta, and was a little buggy for this widget-making master, but take a deep breath, hit refresh, and that should solve the problem. 1. It's slightly more painful than the standard web 2.0 registration process of just username/password creation, but if you're willing to supply your job title, industry, household income, zip code, and birth year, then you're good to go. 2. 3. I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTime. New York Times API Coming - ReadWriteWeb. As print circulation continues its slide at most newspapers, one of the United States’ most respected newspapers, the New York Times, is taking steps to boost online readership.
The paper is already the third most cited web site on Techmeme, and the first on Memeorandum, proving that bloggers at least pay attention to its reporting. Now, the Grey Lady is working on an API that aims to make the entire newspaper “programmable.” In addition to the API, New York Times CTO Marc Frons told mediabistro.com that internal developers at the paper will use the platform to organize structured data on the site. Following that, the paper plans to offer developer keys to the API allowing programmers to more easily mash up the paper’s structured content — reviews, event listings, recipes, etc.
“The plan is definitely to open [the code] up,” Frons said. The API itself should be done by the time summer arrives in the US, with more significant chunks available to the public within 6 months. New York Times Puts Reader Comments on Main Page - Good Idea? - Silicon Alley Insider spotted the New York Times web site displaying reader comments prominently under the top story on their front page today.
The comments in-and-of themselves are not newsworthy -- they came from a post on the site's news blog and the Times has linked to comment threads on the main page before. But this is, to anyone's recollection, the first time the site has actually displayed the actual comments themselves on the site. Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider thought the move was a good one, writing, "Hats off to the company's web team for this smart move!
" Other bloggers weren't so upbeat. While it seems that the NYT times took pains to make sure that comments from both ends of the political spectrum were represented for their main page selections -- often to one extreme or the other -- and comments were edited to fit the space, I do question the wisdom of giving reader commentary such prominence on the site's index page. Image from Silicon Alley Insider.