Click here to add the gadget to your Windows Live SpaceClick here to view the sample of the gadget
Book List Gadget for Windows Live Spaces - Usage InstructionContents at a Glance
- Introduction
- Features
- Preference Storage for Windows Live Spaces
- Author Mode Instruction
- Contact me
- Appendix I - Introduction to Book List Manifest
- Appendix II - DISCLAIMER
- Appendix III - Q & A
Introduction
Thanks for paying attention to Book List Gadget for Windows Live Spaces.
It's my first shippable gadget for Spaces. At first,
building a book list for Windows Live Space is just for the purpose of
providing the missing function for China market (The Spaces for China
market has not a book list with images. Unluckily, my passort was
registered from China but I'm a crazy reader and most of my books are
brought from Amazon!). But during my work, a desire to make it better
increased stronger and stronger in my mind. It's just my style. At
last, I built a book list which can be customized and the gadgets will
display by the owner's settings. Basicly, it will use the information
from the owner. The details from Amazon will be shown if the ower
provides the ISBN and something is missing. Want to have a list in the
most convenient way? Just provide a list of ISBNs and the gadget will
automatically get all the information you need.
Well, let's begin.
Features
Please see Figure 1-3. You can possibly gain a proper
impression what the gadget look like. As you can see it, it's similar
with the book list of Windows Live Spaces. Here're the basic functions
of the gadget: It shows the authors, the title and the publisher.
- The text to show can be given by the owner or from Amazon if ISBNs are provided.
- All the texts will link to some place - if you need them to do so.
- The format of texts can be defined by the ower by 'template'.
- The owner can give a title to the book list.
- The owner can set the position of images - left or right.
- The details can be show/close by a switch for each book. The details are definitely from Amazon when the gadget is loaded.
- The
color of background, plain texts, anchor links and separate line can be
defined by owner. It means the gadget can be configured to work with
almost all the themes.
Preference Storage for Windows Live Spaces
All the gadgets need saving and loading preferences.
Unfortunately, Windows Live Spaces Gadgets haven't build-in function of
preferences preserving (It's unlike gadgets for
Windows Live since there's a huge difference between them and it will cause serious security and perf issues).
For the reason of that, I wrote a simple storage for saving
preferences. It's really simple, not fully stress tested and actually
I've no idea whether it's reliable or not (I've tried my best but who
knows the host service). So please DO NOT try to
break the storage. It seems I've accepted the issues which should be
assumed by Windows Live - it's not interesting - wish my service can
work properly longer.
Please click here to visit the sign up page
(Figure 4) and sign up your space name with password (Your password
will be hashed and store into database and will never exist in clear
text). And, you can change your password in
change password page (Figure 5). Please be careful that you must only register the name of your own space
WITHOUT
'space.live.com' (e.g. I should register 'jeffz-test' as my space name
for my test space). Any mistake could cause another user's being not
able to register. If you find that your space name has been registered
by others, please contact me ASAP.
Author Mode Instructions
After you add the book list gadget into your space, a control panel like Figure 3 will occurred.
Manifest Url is the url of book list manifest provided by the
owner. The manifest is an xml in a specific schema. The schema will be
described in Appendix I.
Title...seems it's self-explanatory enough.
Template is the format to show a single book's title, author
and publisher. A template is a case-sensitive string contains
'{Title}', '{Author}' and '{Publisher}'. They will be replaced by the
corresponding information of book. Template is an optional section. If
the user leave it blank, the gadget will use '{Author}: {Title} -
{Publisher}' as template by default.
Image's Position - left or right.
And then, there're four colors for the owner to input. You can
just use "Black" or "White" to indicated a color (All the colors can be
found
here). Also, a standard #RRGGBB color format can be used.
At last, fill in the password and click Save button to the
save your settings. Please register the storage for you space before
your saving.
Contact me
If you found any bugs or you have any suggests, please feel free to contact me
via E-mail. Also, you can just reply the entry and leave any message here.
I'm always waiting for your feedback.
Appendix I - Introduction to Book List Manifest:
A manifest is an Xml file contains a list of book. The gadget
will prase it and display the information in it. Let's begin with a
simple example.
The Simplest Example
This example is the manifest of Figure 1. Here's the content:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Books>
<Book ISBN="0735621632" />
<Book ISBN="0735619670" />
<Book ISBN="0201799405" />
</Books>
The first line (<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>) of content should be preserved in the manifest. The document element is '<Books />'. There're sub elements '<Book />'
in the document element. Each of them indicates a single book. You can
simply provide the ISBN for each book like above and all the
information will be taken from Amazon.
Customize the books
If you want to show a book which can't be found in Amazon or
you just want to show your own information, you can omit ISBN and give
something you want to show in manifest:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Books>
<Book ISBN="0735619670" />
<Book>
<Title url="[url]http://www.samplebook.com[/url]">Sample Book</Title>
<Author url="[url]http://www.author1.com[/url]">Author 1</Author>
<Author url="[url]http://www.author2.com[/url]">Author 2</Author>
<Publisher url="[url]http://www.samplepublisher.com[/url]">Sample Publisher</Publisher>
</Book>
</Books>
Now gadget will show the infomation in manifest. All
the texts and links will follow the manifest. Please notice that you
can provide more than one authors for a single book.
What if...
Please see the manifest below:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Books>
<Book ISBN="0735619670" />
<Book ISBN="0201799405">
<Title>Sample Book</Title>
<Author url="[url]http://www.author1.com[/url]">Author 1</Author>
<Author url="[url]http://www.author2.com[/url]">Author 2</Author>
</Book>
</Books>
If a valid ISBN is assigned to a book, gadget will look up
Amazon for details. In the example above, the gadget will display the
title without a hyperlink, two authors given by the manifest and the
publisher information with link from Amazon.
For some reasons, if a valid ISBN is assigned to a book, a
detail page will always be shown. The user can click View details/Close
details to switch between breif information and details from Amazon
(Figure 2).
Appendix II - DISCLAIMER:
PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THAT SOME OF THE CONTENT THAT WE MAKE
AVAILABLE TO YOU THROUGH THIS APPLICATION COMES FROM AMAZON WEB
SERVICES. ALL SUCH CONTENT IS PROVIDED TO YOU "AS IS." THIS CONTENT AND
YOUR USE OF IT ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE AND/OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME.
Appendix III - Q & A:TBD
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Book List Gadget for Windows Live Spaces - Usage Instructions
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