Thursday, August 2, 2007

Adding the Me.dium Widget.

It's not clear that I'm supposed to be able to do this yet, but as long as the door is open...

The process comes in three parts: Making your blog. Making your widget. And putting the javascript for invoking the widget into your blog. I'll assume you are making a blog in Google's Blogspot since it's the only blog I've ever made and I was able to do it in about 5 minutes.

From iGoogle at the top click the little down-arrow next to 'more' and select "Blogger".
(First time through it talked about making an account, but it also kind of pushed me through the process.) Go through the process of inventing a name and your part of the URL for the blog. Pick a style, and do whatever other blogger stuff you want. The important thing you're going to want to do later is add a page element and that element will be of type HTML/Javascript. You'll get the Javascript from Me.dium when you make your Widget.

Take note of the URL for your blog. -- Copy it into your cut buffer.

In your Me.dium account find "Manage your Widgets". On the Widget Management page click "Create a Widget". It will ask for a Widget Title -- I haven't figured out how useful that is yet. It will also ask for "URL to spotlight:". Paste or type your blog's URL, and click on the Create Widget button. The next page will present a line of HTML which is the code you will want to insert into your blog. Take note of this line -- copy it into your cut buffer. Press the save changes button.

Return to your blog layout. Add an element of type HTML/Javascript, and paste or type the line of code into its body. Save it. You'll probably want to move it after you look at your widget.
(You can get the magic line of code again from the Widget management screen if you screw up your copy/paste.)

1 comment:

Brian Friend said...

Thanks for the info on getting this set up. I think I probably could have figured it out myself, but this made it a little easier. It also gives me an excuse to actually start writing something on my Blogger account.