Fashion News Widgets

News is the content a website can never stockpile, which made the news widget the most natural widget of all. A fashion news widget let website owners put fashion news onto their own websites: a compact box of current headlines, drawn from the Fashion Newspaper website — a sister publication in the Apparel Search family — and updated as the newsroom published. A fashion blog, a boutique site or an industry portal could greet its visitors with the day’s trade headlines — collections, companies, retail, people — without a newsroom of its own, and every headline linked onward to the full story at the source.

This page is the news widget’s full account: how the box worked and was sized, the definition it shared with every widget, why its platform’s closure ended it everywhere at once, and the feed-based route that still puts fashion headlines on other people’s pages today.

How the News Widget Worked

The host site pasted a short block of code where the headlines should appear, and the widget did the rest, rendering a tidy news box in the space it was given. Sizing was deliberately in the host’s hands: the height and width of the news box could be changed by updating the width and height numbers inside the code — a little hard to find, but there in the code for whoever looked. A narrow box suited a sidebar; a wide one could anchor a homepage. Because the content flowed from the source, the box never needed feeding by hand: publish at the newspaper, and every host site’s box showed the new headline. No support is offered for the old code now — anyone who cannot make a leftover widget work should simply not use it, and take the box out.

What a Widget Is, Underneath the News

In computer programming, a widget — or control — is an interface element that a computer user interacts with, such as a window or a text box. Widgets are sometimes qualified as virtual to distinguish them from their physical counterparts: virtual buttons that can be clicked with a mouse cursor, against physical buttons that can be pressed with a finger. Widgets are often packaged together in widget toolkits, and programmers use widgets to build graphical user interfaces. The news box was that idea pointed at publishing: one interface element, owned by the reader’s page in appearance but fed by the publisher’s stream in substance — which is precisely why its fate was tied to whoever ran the stream.

Why the News Widgets Ended

They were built on SpringWidgets, a platform that launched in 2006. In an effort to control costs and consolidate products, MySpace parent company Fox Interactive Media shuttered SpringWidgets and Flektor, which it had acquired in 2007. A headline box that renders from a closed platform’s servers does not degrade gracefully; it stops. The code that had been displayed for copying was removed because the SpringWidgets were no longer functioning properly, and the same applied to the MySpace profile version of the widget. The episode is now the standard cautionary tale of syndication: distribution borrowed from a platform is distribution the platform can end.

Fashion Headlines Today: The Feed Route

The durable survivor of the system is RSS. Anyone familiar with using RSS can take the Fashion Newspaper’s feeds directly and build on them — in a reader, in a feed-driven headlines page, or in a newsletter — with no widget platform in between. The routes in:

• RSS News Feeds — the feeds the widget system pointed to
• Fashion Newspaper — the publication whose news filled the box
• Fashion News
• Global Fashion News

Headlines still travel; they simply travel by feed and link now, on plumbing that no single closure can switch off. For the full picture of the industry those headlines report, browse fashion across Apparel Search.