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The Mac OS X VQS RSS Feed Widget
Use your Dashboard to keep track of new content.
The idea has been brewing for a long while. After all, there are a ton of widgets out there that seem to monitor just one RSS feed. Why not cook up one to monitor my feed? So I can offer another way for Mac users to keep track of new content on the Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide book companion Web site?
I did some research. Apple’s Web site has a lot of good reference material for creating widgets. And it’s not as tough as you might think. These documents are extremely helpful:
But what was most helpful to me was the article I found on Make Magazine’s Web site: “Make an RSS Widget” by Jake McKenzie. It concentrates on the kind of widget I wanted to create.
The widget is pretty simple. It presents clickable links with the titles of the most recent posts on the Mac OS VQS Companion Web site I maintain to support my Mac OS books. That site has articles of interest to Mac OS users, as well as information about software updates for Mac OS.
Of course, since this is my very first widget and my knowledge of CSS and JavaScript are limited, I have no idea what some of the code does. I need to go through it and understand it to make more modifications. Now it just looks like Jake’s widget with different window dressing and different content — although I did manage to change the dimensions of the widget to make room for my bigger title area.
I’ll be updating the widget periodically, so keep checking in. You can always download the latest version of the widget from this site.
Comments? I’d love to read them. Use the Comments link for this post.