Yourminis.com blog

Our
latest release includes a number of great improvements, including
reporting enhancements, tighter Facebook integration and more.  The
specifics of the release are:

Reporting

• Click
  Reports - We’ve always tracked URL clicks within the widgets, but we’ve
  now begun to track ALL clicks within the widget.  This allows us to
  create a number of interesting reports.  Perhaps the most interesting
  of these new reports is our Heat Map Report.  This report pulls up a
  visual representation of your widget, with an actual Heat Map
  indicating where users are clicking.  This gives you an incredibly
  different perspective on how your widget is being utilized out in the
  world.  A sample heat map is shown below:
  
• Custom
  Tracking Reports - We have exposed API calls which allow a widget
  developer to completely track all clicks within a widget with a path.
  The end result is a text based view into what users are clicking on,
  which can be broken down by our usual parameters (geography, user,
  domain, etc.).
• CSV Export - We’ve added the ability for users
  to export the data in any of the reports, making those reports
  available outside of our system.  To use this functionality, simply
  pull up a report that you’re interested in, as you usually would, and
  once you’re happy with the parameters of the report, simply click the
  "Export" link at the top of the report.  This will initiate a download
  of the data points to your local machine.

Facebook

We’ve
added better support for Facebook applications.  When users add your
Facebook application widgets, they will be prompted to notify their
friends about the application - this will help in spreading your
widget.  Once a user adds the widget to their profile, they can change
the settings of the widget just as they can in our gallery.  Changes to
search criteria, color, etc. will automatically be saved for the next
time they initiate an interaction with the widget.  We’ve also made
some tweaks related to how we handle the image representation of the
widget - it should look significantly cleaner now.

In addition,
we’ve added one often requested feature - custom email templates.  This
allows you to enter in custom HTML code which is used to send out the
"invite a friend" message.  And we’ve also done our usual amount of bug
fixes and smaller enhancements.  Let us know what you think!

Late
last week we release the yourminis widget API (wAPI), an Actionscript
3.0 Library that allows flash content owners to quickly and easily
create engaging widgets that run on both the web and desktop.  We
developed the wAPI from the ground up with information collected from
our development community to improve the development and overall widget
experience.  Some of the additional benefits include:

• Simple Widget Publishing – The latest API
  allows content owners to publish their existing Actionscript 3.0
  widgets/apps and take advantage of a majority of the syndication and
  reporting features with absolutely no code changes.  Our previous
  release required that users download our SDK and make code changes
  before publishing to yourminis.

• Online API Reference – Our latest wAPI
  Reference is now available online from our developer at
  http://www.yourminis.com/developers/docs/as3/index.html .  The wAPI
  Reference docs outline all the packages, classes, methods, events, and
  properties of the object-oriented, actionscript 3.0 widget API
  library.  The docs are generated from our wAPI source and include
  sample code snippets throughtout.  Additionally, the online tutorials
  reference the docs with links directly to the API being referenced
  making learning the yourminis widget API that much easier.

• Dynamic API Binding – All widgets developed
  using the yourminis wAPI Actionscript 3.0 library no longer statically
  link to the API classes.  This provides the ability to develop on the
  wAPI without any downloads, using any text/actionscript editor, on any
  platform.  We do encourage users to download our SDK which includes an
  .mxp Flash CSE Extension specifically built to make the widget
  development process easier.

• Event Listeners – The wAPI leverages
  Actionscript 3.0 EventListener class to dispatchEvents to listening
  objects.  This allows developers to write more advanced widgets that
  may have multiple listeners and a complex object hierarchy than was
  previously possible with the previous yourminis Actionscript 2 widget
  API.

• Object-Oriented Improvements – We have further
  broken the main widget functions into separate classes.  This helps
  make the code easier to understand and to write.  As well, classes such
  as the HTTPLoader and RSSLoader extend and incorporate existing flash
  classes and methods making it easier to transition from existing code.
  For example, calling widget.navigateToURL instead of flash’s
  navigateToURL will add both URL click tracking to your widget and
  myspace click support.  If you have code that handles RSSParsing based
  on a URLLoader, you can use the same code while utilizing the RSSLoader
  in place of the URLLoader (RSSLoader extends URLLoader)

In addition to the aforementioned widget benefits, developers get
all of the innate advantages of using Actionscript 3.0 including (for
an overview, check out
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/actionscript3_overview.html)

• Faster processing - “ActionScript 3.0
  introduces a new highly optimized ActionScript Virtual Machine, AVM2,
  which dramatically exceeds the performance possible with AVM1. As a
  result, ActionScript 3.0 code executes up to 10 times faster than
  legacy ActionScript code.”

• ECMAScript for XML (E4X) – “E4X offers a
  natural, fluent set of language constructs for manipulating XML. Unlike
  traditional XML parsing APIs, E4X makes XML feel like a native data
  type of the language. E4X streamlines the development of applications
  that manipulate XML by drastically reducing the amount of code needed.”

• Regular Expressions – “ActionScript 3.0
  includes native support for regular expressions so you can quickly
  search for and manipulate strings. ActionScript 3.0 implements the
  regular expressions defined in the ECMAScript Language Specification
  (ECMA-262).”

• Type safety – “In ActionScript 2.0, type
  annotations were primarily an aid for developers; at runtime, all
  values were dynamically typed.  In ActionScript 3.0, type information
  is preserved at runtime and utilized for a number of purposes. Flash
  Player performs runtime type checking, improving the system’s type
  safety. Type information is also used to represent variables in native
  machine representations, improving performance and reducing memory
  usage.”

• Run-time exceptions – “In ActionScript 2.0,
  many runtime errors would fail in a graceful but silent fashion. This
  ensured that Flash Player would not display some inexplicable dialog
  box, which JavaScript did in early web browsers. On the other hand,
  this lack of error reporting made it more challenging to debug
  ActionScript programs.   ActionScript 3.0 introduces a variety of
  runtime exceptions for common error conditions, improving the debugging
  experience and enabling applications that handle errors robustly.
  Runtime errors can provide stack traces annotated with source file and
  line number information, helping to pinpoint errors quickly.”

Last but not least, widgets within the yourminis platform continue to take advantage of benefits including:

• Automatic Copying - of your widget to the top
  startpages, blogging platforms, social networks, and desktop widget
  platforms, along with inline email sharing

• Tracking - of views, time spent, users,
  geolocation, interactions, URL clicks, copies, and custom actions for
  your widget with detailed reporting.

• HTTP/RSS - Proxying, caching, authorization,
  conversion of RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, ATOM 0.3, and ATOM 1.0 to RSS 2.0 of
  3rd party data feeds (without the need for crossdomain.xml)

• Management Dashboard - for updating content, widget configurations, blacklisting, syndication destinations, and 3rd party gallery publishing

• Global caching network  - for faster widget downloads…

Look for added enhancements to our platform over the coming weeks….

We’ve
been quiet for a bit, working on a pretty major release.  We’ll have
more info on that later in the day, but in the meantime, we wanted to
introduce everyone to our latest widget, MTV’s VMA Widget:

MTV 2007 VMA

Get your own text up on the marquee by clicking "MAKE YOUR OWN", type in the text you want, and then click "COPY THIS WIDGET"!