LibraryThing widgets

[suncat]

After much hair-pulling and help from another LibraryThing member, I retraced my steps to their instructions for making a widget for LJ-style sites, including Dreamwidth. baggyeyes suggested I mention it here.

This widget works at DW because it doesn't use JavaScript or any such, but relies on data fetched from LibraryThing.

You can see an example on my journal in the sidebar.

This style of widget was described in a blog post at LibraryThing.

Comments

[foxfirefey]

You should post this to dw_nifty!

Cool!

[jaebility]

How'd you do it? I would love to add my LibraryThing thinger to my DW, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to.

Re: Cool!

[suncat]

Hm. Yes, the LT blog post linked above can be rather cryptic. Maybe if you looked at that along with the HTML for one of my journal pages. Do a "view page source" when you're looking at my journal, and you should get the HTML into a separate text window. Then search for "widget.php". That should be the code that is creating the widget image as the src for the <img> element in my Custom Text section of the sidebar.

My LT name is "Suncat", and you can see that as the value of the widget "view" parameter. You can see where I gave the text for the title that is shown at the top of the widget. I set it to be 205 pixels wide, to fit into my sidebar. I also told it to just select books using one of my LT tags: it's set to "art" right now. And I thought there was a widget parameter to say how many books to show, but I sure don't see that in the string. Maybe that's a default of 10, and I decided to just use that. You'll also need to be able to specify colors in hex format if you want to change from the default colors.

Re: Cool!

[jaebility]

Thanks for your help! I got it working - But only briefly. Now it just says "Nothing found," which is baffling and annoying. But! I think I'm making progress.

Thanks again!

Re: Cool!

[baggyeyes]

Try this, but take out 'okwari' and replace it with your own?

<div class="ltwidget">
<img src="http://www.librarything.com/gwidget/widget.php?view=okwari&type=random&width=205&top=From my pile of books&bc=fff&ac=ccc&tc=272133&hc=262831&hbold=1&tbold=1"></div>

Re: Cool!

[jaebility]

And we have liftoff! Thanks so much for your help - Eeeee I'm so glad it works.