Hey All,
I’m constantly on the look for new and useful things for people and websites. One of my client (Famous Framus) has a website that I am working on with him. We are in the process of updating it so that his media files play easier over the web. While it is nice to have a high-quality song or video to watch, most people will gladly trade off a lengthy download for a quick view online.
I have submitted quite a few of his videos to YouTube.com. This accomplishes quite a number of things, such as having someone else pay for the bandwidth/storage space, while also giving him more exposure to people outside of his website and allowing visitors to watch his videos effectively in two places instead of one.
Next step will be doing the same for his music files. To that end I have found a neat little widget that I’m going to give a shot. While it’s not exactly the same as video hosting, it will allow songs to play quicker and right on his site. Let’s see how it works here first. This is a sample preview and it looks quite promising.
The applications of this is quite endless. While many people still want ‘bigger and better’ sites, most people can get by with just a few minor improvements, such as small widgets like this.
Artists can play their songs easily and people can share small photos that don’t need to be 800×600 in size.
I’ll be back when I try some custom files of my own choosing.
Ok, here are a couple of Famous Framus’ songs.
Get your own Box.net widget and share anywhere!
And again slightly modified title, colour and size.
Get your own Box.net widget and share anywhere!
The widget is not terribly flexible but I’m sure they’ll have more options as it develops and demands start pouring in. I’d like to see one that is white with black text as that is the theme of Famous Framus and a colour scheme that is simple for a lot of sites.
Enjoy the music!
Ok, so exploring this concept of their further I’ve found a few things. At first it looked like I could only have one widget per e-mail address, until I clicked on the little login link while I was at the ‘add file to widget’ menu. This seemed to be a bit of a clumsy way. Even when I did log in, creating a new widget wasn’t obvious. it seems that you have to create a new folder, upload music/files and then click on the little drop down arrow and choose ‘get a widget’ link. A simple ‘create a new widget’ button would be immensely helpful for new people. Techies like me can eventually find their way around but the general populace wants it fast and easy.
Blogger has 3 steps. Box Widget should be similiar and obvious.
I think we’ll be seeing more of Box Widget. I know I want to make more use of it because it is a pretty nifty toy, despite the little bit of running around to do extra things.
