Recently, a fellow Zazzler brought to my attention the fact that one of the Zazzle Widgets I have developed wasn't playing nicely with Internet Explorer. I don't know how that slipped by me. After a little investigation, it turned out I had similar problems with all of them.

Cross-browser issues are always a pain. Ask any web designer or developer. Anyway, I did some minor tweaking on all of the widgets to ensure that they would display correctly in IE, Fireforx, Safari, and Google Chrome. Nothing is perfect but, for now it seems like they're all working fine. If anyone notices any other problems please let me know.

By the way, I also added some features that were requested a while ago to the My Zazzle Products widget. Previously the borders around the images were stuck at Zazzle Store Builder's default color. Now you can customize that too and even choose a secondary border color to use when the products are hovered over.

Enjoy!

http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/zazzle-featured

http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/zazzle-products

http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/zazzle-slideshow

This past week I've released another Zazzle widget! This time my aim was to develop something that would mimic the functionality of Zazzle's Top Picks feature that lots of us use on our galleries. My new widget gives you the ability to pick your best products and display them in a fully customizable slideshow. This widget does not rely on RSS so you have complete control over which products are shown!

You can even add your own text to show along with each image. Choose to show a different message for each product or break up one message into several parts. Use the control buttons or leave them hidden, and even link to pagess that use Zazzle's Zbar.

To top it all off, this time you can use your own Associate ID. The widget rolls the dice. Half of the time it uses your ID and the other half of the time it uses mine. 

So far I've put out three widgets. Each functions in a slightly different way. When combined these tools allow you to incorporate nearly everything you love about your Zazzle gallery into your own website, blog, or social profile. 

In the example below, I threw in a couple of my products to show you what it looks like.

This past week I set my sights on alternative methods of showcasing my Zazzle products. Zazzle provides their Blog Panel and Flash Panel. Both are great tools which can be deployed fairly quickly but I wanted more options. The Flash Panel is too bulky to fit in all web layouts and the Blog Panel is too simple. I wanted to be able to control the size of the display and the number of products shown. 

Here's what I came up with...

My Zazzle Products - This widget, which is available on WidgetBox.com, is my alternative to the Blog Panel is my "My Zazzle Products" . It's basically an alteration of Zazzle Store Builder. There are guides to help you install the Builder yourself but if you're unfamiliar with PHP or don't have web hosting it can be a hassle. With this widget you can create a customized display of your latest and greatest Zazzle creations for your blog or website by entering your contributor name and the number of products you want to show. You can also choose to limit it to show products from a specific product line or products of a specific type! You can also choose to show your most popular or most recently created products. 

The example below shows my 3 most popular t-shirts. Everytime the page is reloaded, the display will be updated so don't have to keep updating this post manually.

Zazzle Products Showcase - This one, also avaliable on WidgetBox.com, is my alternative to the Flash Panel. It's a mashup of Zazzle Store Builder and Google's Ajax Feed API. With this one you can create a controllable slideshow of your Zazzle creations by entering similar information as you do in the first. Again, you can pick a single product line or product type but this time you can also limit the display by entering a keyword. Other improvements include the ability to change the backgorund color of the products displayed to match the background of your site and the ability to size the display anywhere from 1 to 500 pixels wide. This way the display can fit your site perfectly!

The example below shows a slideshow of the 5 most recent T-shirts from my Mexico product line.

By the way, you don't have to be a Zazzler to use these widgets. You can leave the contributor field blank to showcase Zazzle products on any topic you choose! Enjoy!