Primer

This is a primer/FAQ on Clearspring Widgets at WordPress.com. It’s a sort of keynote post for this blog.

What is WordPress.com? WordPress.com is a web site that provides free hosting for WordPress blogs. It is different from WordPress.org. At your WordPress.com blog, you can’t use javascript and you can’t use Flash: to be more specific, you can’t use them directly.

What is a widget? Given what we’re trying to understand here, we need two definitions. We’ll start with the more general.

1. To Clearspring, a widget is just a chunk of HTML, Javascript, a Flash SWF, or an image, designed to be delivered modularly and shared across the web.
2. At WordPress.com, “Widget” is just a fancy word for tools and content that you can add, arrange, and remove from the sidebar area of your blog.

From this point on, widget refers to definition 1, with WordPress widget being used to refer to definition 2.

What is Clearspring? Clearspring is a platform for distributing, tracking, monetizing and sharing dynamic web application components and content, also called widgets. Let me translate: Clearspring enables you to do almost anything with widgets. The main reason I use almost is that Clearspring doesn’t enable you to create widget content.

Is it time for an example of a Clearspring widget? You asked for it…

[clearspring_widget title=”Widget” wid=”491f55764d73b3af” pid=”491f5899b2268136″ width=”450″ height=”400″ domain=”widgets.clearspring.com”]

Are there other widget platforms? Why focus on Clearspring? Yes, but Clearspring is the one for which there is a WordPress.com shortcode.

What’s a WordPress.com shortcode? There is an FAQ page that answers this, and lists available shortcodes. But for the purposes of this primer, we can do better than (the current edition of) that page, which doesn’t list the clearspring_widget shortcode. The most interesting shortcodes, including the clearspring_widget shortcode, allow you to post content you couldn’t otherwise post to your WordPress.com blog. For example, using Clearspring requires javascript, which WordPress.com doesn’t allow; but the shortcode invokes the required javascript, and only that script.

Clearspring widgets can be used at WordPress.com. So what? There are at least three reasons why this is good news.

1. Web services with javascript widgets can make those widgets available to WordPress.com bloggers. For example, the music service Lala has done this.
2. Even when the web service hasn’t made its widgets available at WordPress.com, others can use Clearspring to make them available. For example, I’ve done this for Goodreads.
3. You can create your own widgets and publish them to your WordPress.com blog, as well to as to pretty much any other site. I’ve done this; in fact, it’s how the example widget got on to this page.

How does Springrolled fit into this?There are several ways in which Springrolled could fit in. Each of the first three follows on from one of the answers to the previous question.

1. Identify the widgets that use the clearspring_widget shortcode. That might be better done by the folks at Clearspring or at WordPress.com, but if neither of them do it, I probably will.
2. Wrap up javascript (and Flash) widgets using Clearspring for fellow WordPress.com bloggers to use. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that I call this springrolling.
3. Develop custom widgets for use at WordPress.com and elsewhere.
4. Provide further explanation of Clearspring, which raises the awful prospect of The Clearspring Chronicles, Volume 2. Or there might be just an inoffensive post or two on widget development.

It’s clear to me (and my family) that I’d need to charge for the 2nd and 3rd of these. Charging would make this a business blog. I think it would be the kind of business blog that’s welcome on WordPress.com, but I have contacted support to check.