Spice Up Your Blog with a Collecta Widget

January 27, 2010

Today, Collecta announced our new widget system, which allows anyone to easily embed real-time searches on any topic virtually anywhere. Here is an example for an XMPP search:

And the code you can use to add this to your page:

<iframe style="border: medium none; width: 300px; height: 600px; overflow: hidden;" src="http://widget.collecta.com/widget.html?query=XMPP&alias=&headerimg=http%3A%2F%2Fmetajack.im%2Fimages%2Fxmpp-horiz.png&stylesheet=http%3A%2F%2Fmetajack.im%2Fmisc%2Fxmpp_widget.css&delay=" id="widgetframe" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

</code>

There is even an easy-to-use Collecta WordPress plug-in.

:EXTENDED:

This widget is a full-fledged XMPP client, receiving notifications from Collecta’s pubsub service. It is powered, of course, by Strophe.js. You’d probably never notice that it uses XMPP; it is completely invisible in this application, as it should be. The users only care that it is fast and the results are near-instantaneous.

Over the last week we’ve had a chance to watch our hard work put to the test by MySpace, who have been experimentally embedding Collecta widgets on pages like Today on MySpace and MySpace Breaking news. The XMPP traffic generated has been many times our previous maximum throughput, but the system as handled it quite gracefully. The one issue that eventually cropped up was not a fault of XMPP or a browser bug; it was just a small bug in our own subscription handling code.

Over ten years of design and implementation experience is baked into XMPP and its extensions, and it shows when it performs so well and makes these difficult tasks possible and almost easy.