I’d been working on this webpart ages ago to enter into the NewsGator API competition but didn’t end up getting it finished in time to submit it. Left it sitting in the projects folder for a couple of months until I decided to finish it this weekend as I was feeling a little ill and didn’t want to leave the house!
So what’s it all about then? Well I called it SharePointGator (no doubt infringing on some copywrite), as it’s a NewsGator webpart for SharePoint. Using the NewsGator webservice and your newsgator account details you can now view the rss feeds and unread blog posts from your newsgator account in SharePoint.
There are a couple of scenarios I could see this being used for. Firstly is a company allowing this webpart to be used by users on their personal SharePoint Portal ‘MySites’. The other would be for a company to have the webpart on the homepage of their SharePoint portal with the NewsGator account subscribed to feeds that the company feels all employees should be reading.
Here are a few images of the webpart working:
Click on the image above and you can see the list of feeds that you are subscribed to with NewsGator. At the moment these are displayed in the order they are returned from NewsGator. It’d be an improvement to order them alphabetically, or other methods of ordering. Click on a link of a feed and you’ll see what’s shown in the image below:
Above you can see a list of posts for the feed that you have not read yet according to your NewsGator subscription. Click on a link to read that post, or at the bottom you can see a link saying “back to feeds…” that will take you back to the initial page. Perhaps I should make that a little bolder and but a link space inbetween the links and the back link. Also I’ve just realised that there’s no overall blog title above the post titles you are reading. Like I said it’s work in development! Anyway, click on a blog posts title and you’ll see the image below:
Click the image above and you’ll now see the actual blog post displayed below this list of titles. The idea of NewsGator is that you can read a blog post at home, and then go to work and open your NewsGator RSS reader, and you won’t have to see the same post again. At the moment SharePointGator does not mark the post as read. If I get any feedback on SharePointGator and amazingly anyone starts using it, I’ll probably put the option of marking it as read in.
So how can you get SharePointGator? Well if you want it let me know and I’ll email the necessary parts over. You obviously need a NewsGator account as well!!! I’ve got it installed and running with trust level being full. I need to figure out a custom security policy and policy file that SharePointGator needs to be able to run as we all know running full trust isn’t the best option! If you have a development SharePoint site though and you’d like to test it out let me know. Otherwise hold on for a couple of weeks and I’ll wrap up a decent CAB file and installation instructions.
Anyway, all feedback gratefully appreciated. If you think the whole idea sucks as well tell me…..I can then find some other webpart to spend my free time on!
Update : you can now download the webpart from here http://weblog.vb-tech.com/nick/archive/2006/03/06/1465.aspx