Snipperoo Sizzles
After some hand-holding from Ivan, I got Snipperoo working on my personal blog. The basic misunderstanding I had was that I thought all the widgets shown in the help screens were pre-existing ones I could add to my panel with one click whereas in fact you have to create each one by hand. This sounds awkward but isn’t. Just take the normal snippet of code you would use to show that widget on your blog and paste it into a new “module” in Snipperoo. I did this with all my existing widgets and replaced a mess of code in my sidebar with a single Wordpress Sidebar Text Widget pointing over to Snipperoo.
Now any time I want to add or remove cool widgets, I wander over to Snipperoo, do the changes and they automatically appear on the blog. In this early phase you don’t gain an enormous amount over using standard Wordpress Sidebar widgets but the potential is clear to see, particularly when all the most popular ones become one click additions.
Whilst the directory/gallery is confusing at the minute, at least you can see the multitude of widgets available. I could waste hours in there. I’m looking forward to the site revamp, particularly in this area.
I’ve only had one issue so far - the FeedButton widget seems to be not only incompatible when embedded in Snipperoo, it won’t even co-exist in the sidebar with it. I’ve removed it for the minute as it’s not the most important widget around.
I’m convinced that having a blog or public social networking page will become as ubiquitous as having a mobile phone. Not everyone will be a “blogger” in the current sense of the term but we’ll all have an online identity (“all” meaning those with some form of broadband). Given this, we’ll each want a custom identity, but far beyond our ringtones and crappy MySpace wallpapers. Widgets will provide a lot of that identity by pulling in and pushing out data to and from the edges and presenting the virtual you.