My First UWA Widget for Netvibes and iGoogle (2009)
Archival repost — originally published on my old blog on January 18, 2009. Lightly cleaned up for dev.to (translated from French; I also dropped my personal TVRage feed hash from the example URL rather than repost a token — TVRage itself shut down years ago anyway). Netvibes and iGoogle are both long gone as platforms and the UWA widget format died with them, but the "aggregate a messy feed into…
On January 18, 2009, a developer shared their first UWA widget for Netvibes and iGoogle, which they created to display air times for their regularly watched TV shows. The widget employed a mashup approach, utilizing a service from TVRage to fetch personalized RSS feeds of airing shows. These feeds were messy and inconsistent, requiring additional effort to aggregate them into a clean format.
To expedite the widget's development, the author wrote a small PHP5 API to process the feed and sort the data. Although a UWA/JS parser provided by Netvibes existed, the author opted for the PHP solution, as they weren't planning to distribute the widget. The widget required three parameters: the tid and hash from the personalized feed URL, and the API endpoint.
Today, Netvibes, iGoogle, TVRage, and UWA have all disappeared, but the approach of aggregating a messy feed into a clean personal widget remains relevant.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
