November 13, 2006

The Three Faces of Grazr

I've been playing with Grazr quite a bit lately (doodling with an Amazon Grazr search widget, for example, as well as StringLE) and here are three distinct ways I've found of using it:

  1. for navigation - links can be fed into a Grazr sidebar widget configured to open clicked links in a named frame (typically a large central panel), using a linktarget argument in the Grazr URL; the script at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/grazr/grazrNav.php takes two arguments - s= sets the URL for the 'splash' page that is displayed in the central panel when the page loads; the u= argument is the URL for the feed that is loaded into the Grazr widget; Grazr navigation example;

  2. reading content - a Grazr widget can be used as a feed reader; just pass the Grazr widget the URL of the feed you want to read; Grazr feedreading exmple;

  3. as a (search) widget - the introduction of GrazrScript means that Grazr can make use of form elements to create customised, feed generating URLs; for search engines and catalogues that Grazr form based (search) widget example (Amazon search); it is also possible to create a search engine widget if you can get search results into an RSS format, like this Google search Grazr widget;

Another three faces of Grazr are the three views it supports: slider view, outline view and three pane view. I also just noticed there's a built in audio player, so for podcast feeds that have an audio file attachment, you can listen to the podcast directly within Grazr... :-)

Try this, for example - I started pulling together a collection of audio files in the Podchains podcast playlist builder. Using Grazr, I now have a really handy way of playing the files contained in my podchains OUseful Audio feed - try it out here: Grazr does audio....

Looks like StringLE will now be able to do audio ;-)

PS I just added this as a PS to the Amazon Grazr widget post, but I know how rarely I read reposts, so I'm going to post it here too:

Here's a quick way of customising a Grazr/Amazon search widget to let you 'hardwire' the locale and product type for the search. There are two buttons in the form - one uses Javascript, the other doesn't:

Amazon Search:
Locale:
Shop:
Javascript:
Form Action:

If the form doesn't appear in you feedreader, you can find one here: Amazon/Grazr search widget customiser

Posted by ajh59 at November 13, 2006 12:42 AM
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