Patapage

A new button in Patapage: “chart”, which let’s you define data series and add them on any page of your site, in different styles.

You create your Patapage button as usual, get a small JavaScript to paste, and then you’ll have on the site a button, we chose a docked button for the example:

http://patapage.com/demo/chart.jsp

And then by clicking and doing log in, you will be able to insert and edit chart data:

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Picking “edit data” you get and editable list of data, editable in-place in the browser:

and you can add series on the fly, change data etc. Picking “edit configuration” a host of options for your graph layout appear:

and you can play and get your desired graph.

Notice that the chart preview changes on the fly while you do your tests.

Also Patapage will keep a (deletable) history of changes you (or others) did on the chart and data, so that it is possible to recover a previous version and see the history of changes. In fact, you may even ask site visitors to contribute data.

Isn’t this a quick and effective way to enrich your web site?

In this blog post, JavaScript charting tools: an overview, Roberto talks about the  jqPlot library we used and why it was selected.

“You can use RSS channels to allow customers to keep up on industry specific news, check weather, look for jobs, view upcoming concerts or university lectures, monitor specific websites, and much more.”

From Publish and Syndicate Your News to the Web

Today we updated the Patapage service adding a new functionality: you can now use any RSS feed to display contents on your pages. An example is online here:

http://patapage.com/demo/rss.jsp

where you see two buttons which open Patapage’s blog RSS, the first one displaying abstracts, the second one displaying full contents (see the screenshot below).

The first example that comes to mind is to use your blog posts as news for your site. Or to enrich a page on a specific topic with one or more feeds of blogs or sites specialized on that topic.

Or say if you want to read from a Twitter stream, fortunately on any Twitter stream the RSS is always available.

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So for example in the unlikely case you want to feed a page with my Twitter stream, you have already three choices in Patapage: use the Twitter button, use it as RSS stream, or use the window component to load the Twitter page directly.

Almost all mature web sites / services expose their “products” in form of RSS feeds; in the example page we’ve put also

the Rolling Stone recent reviews,

the New York Times news from the home page,

and Amazon’s best sellers in books.

Of course Patapage also works “the other way round”, as supplier of RSS news: e.g. the list of comments for a page can be read in RSS form.

This is yet another step in making Patapage a complete tool for “empowering” a web site, with almost no development and maintenance effort for the users

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In a just released update of the Patapage service we introduced a new functionality: PataPic, which lets you take screenshots of web sites and have them available as an online URL, a bit like the TwitPic service for Twitter; PataPic also lets you download a Balsamiq Mockup file which contains a “sketched” version of the site image, which you can then annotate with all the Balsamiq Mockup tools. One Look is Worth A Thousand Words:

Say the site is our example one, Liz’:

and you are its designer and you’ve built a draft of the new version of it: now you want to show it around, giving the opportunity of making suggestions for improvements. Just add the PataPic button to such page(s), and when the visitors / contributors will click the button they will get the image generator page:

Proceeding they will get the URL to the screenshot:

Now they will have a public web link to the image (which may even be shortened), and if they have Balsamiq Mockups installed, the visitors can download and open the bmml file, obtaining in this case:

Ta-da: Your site in Mockups. Notice the cool “sketch it” effect: this way the user added notes are more readable, and it is immediately clear that your proposal isn’t the original site. Once they have completed their annotations, say obtaining this:

they can contribute the file or its screenshot back on the page using PataPic upload, getting:

You can see all this on a sample page here: http://www.open-lab.com/patapagedemo/patapic.html, or even better you can enroll in Patapage and try it on your site or on a test page.

We thank the Balsamiq guys for feedback. Get the Balsamiq Mockups application from this site: (produced by Balsamiq Studios):

http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups

One Look is Worth A Thousand Words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_words

In this blog post, Pietro presents how the idea of Patapage was shaped by thinking about mashup and web widgets generalization.

In order to record the new introductory Patapage video, this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX1KONEMA_M

we’ve created a sample static site which we then transformed using some (not all) Patapage functionalities.

Before Patapage

http://patapage.com/demo/index.jsp

Added the default docked buttons

Integrated the buttons in the site
http://patapage.com/demo/fullSite.jsp

(click on the “show”, “gallery” etc. links).

In all the three version check out also the linked “about” page.

We are releasing an update which will contain a new button which will let you add Google customized search to your site, and an extension for all windows opened by buttons: it will be possible to set size and position of each opened window.