Nearly a week into the Olympics, CTV unveiled their Olympic widget. The widget is put together by ClearSpring and can be embedded just about anywhere easily, including any Wordpress-based blog.
Check out the left pane of http://www.theupsons.net for a peek at what the finished product looks like.
The process is automated if you have a Wordpress.com site by navigating the widget self-help wizard. For those using Wordpress on their own domain on a non-Wordpress server, this process breaks down when it presents a form for input of a wordpress.com username and account. Fear not, the process for any wordpress site, wordpress.com or otherwise homegrown is right here.
- At the bottome right of the widget, click the “Grab It!” link on the widget
- At the bottom right of the widget window that pops up, click “Copy Code”
- In the Wordpress administrative panel navigate to Appearance and then to Widgets
- Create a new Text widget by dragging it into your site layout and paste the CTV/ClearSpring widget code copied in step 2 into the text box for this new Wordpress text widget
- Adjust the height and width parameters in the code to suit your placement if required
Great work by ClearSpring. The delay in CTV’s unveiling of the widget could be aligned with some *new* resources managing the web presence at CTV, otherwise I would have expected this long before now. Likely these new thinkers are getting a lot of praise and are clearly a side step from some of the less successful technology choices for the CTV site.
Specifically, it is refreshing to see some best practices in play after a bit of disappointment in CTV’s online implementation of streaming Olympic content (based on the SilverLight platform) which unfortunately meant no coverage for us here at the house and any of my peers and engineering team at the office (who also use an Ubuntu OS desktop platform and who probably share the same frustration that the engineers at that other media company that backed Avatar have with their streaming content from CTV).
It is worth noting that CBC streaming video works just fine, everywhere. If only they had negotiated some ability to rebroadcast online for CTV; If so they would have benefited from being the only provider for a growing subset of the Canadian online viewing market, Ubuntu OS users.
To CTV’s credit, the coverage and availability of content is great; It is just unfortunate that being on the Internet in Canada is not the only prerequisite. If Novell’s moonlight version gets a little bit better (Currently results in Unhandled Exception: System.ExecutionEngineException: SIGILL) then there may be hope.. but probably not in time for the Olympics.
