Eurekster Swicki Blog

ZDNet's Dan Farber sat down with our CEO, Steve Marder to chat about big growth in our publisher community, our multimedia buzzcloud (gotta love the Chappelle pics!), monetization opportunities for swicki owners and some cool new features under development and on the horizon.

He also nicely summed up the main attraction of swickis over typical web search:

Rather than the chewing through the worldwide index and link structures, swicki combines several elements to create more finely tuned search results for online communities.

Check out the full ZDNet article on Dan's Between the Lines blog here.

In addition to the growing list of swicki widgets we've developed for platforms like TypePad, Wordpress, and Blogger, Eurekster's now a member of the partner program of WidgetBox, a new beta marketplace for managed web based widgets. Widgetbox offers a directory of Web widgets in categories like search, communications, media and even games that users can configure and embed onto their web pages.

The Widgetbox site also provides tools for folks to build their own widgets. We recently built a generic widget that can be used as a wrapper for any swicki. You can check it out here and drop me a line at swickifeedback with, well...feedback.

What I'm really interested in seeing is how you, our swicki publishers, fare in building your own custom swicki widgets. A whole Widgetbox search sub-category comprised of swicki widgets by topic? How about your Hip Hop Search Engine swicki widget ready-to drop into music blogs across the web? Or a widget that lets fan site webmasters embed your Johnny Depp swicki right on to their pages, tuned and ready to serve pirate-riffic search results, including dreamy 21 Jump Street pics from your multimedia buzz cloud? The opportunities for syndication of your topic-specific and community-tuned swicki through Widgetbox are pretty cool.

Congrats to Ed, Giles and Dean on the launch of this already few-hundred widgets strong repository for the growing number of web services available out there, including our swicki widget. Be sure to check out ours, and look into rolling your own.

Directions: The following is a sampling of styles that can be used to customize the template of your Swicki.

Click on the screenshot to enlarge the image.

1. Page Background Color

body,html {

/* zeroes out page for all browsers */

margin:0;

padding:0;

border:0;

background:#ededed

}

----

2. Header Background Color & Image

.swickiHeader {

background:#c8c8c8 url(http://swicki.eurekster.com/images/bg_header.gif) no-repeat top;

padding:10px 10px 15px

}

----

3. Container Background Color

.swickiContainer {

width:800px;

margin: 0 auto 19px auto ;

background:#fff;

padding:10px;

}

----

4. Search Title Size & Color

h1.swickiSearchTitle {

font-size:2em;

margin:0;

padding:0;

color:#333332;

position:relative

}

h1.swickiSearchTitle a:link,h1.swickiSearchTitle a:visited {

color:#333332;

text-decoration:none

}

----

5. Byline Size & Color

p.swickiByline {

font-size:.9em;

color:#595959;

margin:2px 0 0;

padding:0;

position:relative

}

p.swickiByline a:link,p.swickiByline a:visited {

color:#595959;

text-decoration:none

}

----

6. Search Field Background Color

.swickiSearchField {

width:340px;

background:#feffff;

margin:3px 5px 0 0;

font-size:1.8em;

vertical-align:bottom;

float:left

}

----

7. Sidebar Background Color

.swickiSidebar {

width:197px;

float:right;

margin-top:10px;

padding-left:10px;

background-color:#181817;

}

----

8) Footer Background Color

.swickiFooter {

clear:both;

background:#f0f0f0;

padding:10px 10px 45px

}

----

9) Results Container

.swickiResultContainer {

background:#181817;

width:auto;

padding:.8em 36px;

}

----

10) Hot Cloud Link Colors

.hotcloud a:link,.hotcloud a:visited {

text-decoration:none;

color:#db6700;

}