8 July 2008 - 11:08Zone Magazine Widget

We’ve just developed a new widget for Zone Magazine.

It shows you the latest edition of the magazine, links to the website, allows you to sign up & links to the magazine pdf.

Some Background:

I needed a project to get my teeth fully into Widgets, and how they can be grabbed, shared & tracked on Facebook, IGoogle, MySpace, Wordpress, Bebo etc..

We had recently worked on a web site for Zone Magazine, which is a lifestyle magazine, publishing through PDF Downloads.

The site templates we built, lets Zone update their microsite every month, to display an overview of the latest edition.

From the homepage, you can view the cover image, downlaod the PDF, view an XML/Flash slideshow of the pages and sign up as a subscriber to the magazine.

So I decided to see how quickly I could develop a widget that hooks into this existing content, and so, as Zone change their monthly information, so the widget would update wih the latest content feeds, and also allow widget users to signup and download the latest edition directly.

Well, it turns out, after I had it designed, it took a day to build and about half a day to get to grips with the Clearspring interface, register the widget, publish it, set up it’s homepage and even convert it into a proper facebook application… nice!

Zone Magazine is the brainchild of Andy Newson, and is a free lifestyle monthly publication produced for Crowborough, Uckfield and Heathfield areas. It is a quality publication, full of great content, design & photography.

Feel free to grab, share and publish this widget to your own sites / blogs etc…Nice… feel free to grab it and place it on your blogs, myspace, facebook, website, whatever!!!

I’d love to hear what you think!!!

Cheers

Mike