Last week myself and some co-workers launched a new internal business intelligence application to help us better identify issues out in the field – basically it is a worm (ala television debates) which takes the pulse of people across the Readify business.
Please note this isn’t the live data, we are just doing something to our test SQL server at the moment so I can’t show the real stuff right now (I would if I could – honest).
Anyway, after a few minor tweaks to the HTML in the page (basically adding a container div, a header and content div with special class values) I got the desired effect.
For the observant I am using the Google Charts API exposed to ASP.NET through this neat control written by Chris Pietschmann (when is Microsoft going to ship a charts API so that I don’t have to use Google?). Anyway, once this is done, the magic happens and hey presto, I’ve got WebSlices!
Which means that I can add it to the top of my IE8 window, like this.
I think the Internet Explorer team has done a really great job of making this particular feature brain dead simple which should help drive adoption. I’m always checking this page during the day at the moment so this will allow me to take a quick peak.
If you want to implement WebSlices in your own applications check out these resources.
- http://visitmix.com/blogs/Joshua/IE8-Activities-With-Jane-Kim/
- http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/default.aspx
- http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=ie8whitepapers&ReleaseId=567
Got any questions – post a comment!
March 6, 2008 at 10:56 am
This is extremely cool. It’s a bit like RSS but with absolutely any content and styled however you want. I can’t see it replacing RSS because it’s obviously not as portable, but very useful if you want to track a chunk of a site while you’re doing somehting else.
I don’t doubt it will be long before a firefox extension crops up to support the same feature.
March 6, 2008 at 5:26 pm
I’ve had a quick go too using the info at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc304073(VS.85).aspx
Could be my implementation (using the rel=”feedurl” attribute to give a navigation route from the webslice to the relevant page) but once I’ve followed the slice I only get that slice when I navigate to the page. Hmmm. Otherwise I’ll be adding this to webpages I design shortly.
Is this in Firefox / Gran-Paradiso yet?
March 10, 2008 at 11:04 pm
[...] Mitch’s blog post about how to implement WebSlices [...]
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