Wijard

MOO, the people who put the card in Wijard, just announced a free shipping offer. It lasts for the rest of this month, and applies to orders over $100 (or similar amount in other currencies).

I’ve just done a little work on the Order page. While I need to do more on that and on other aspects of Wijard, I hereby declare Wijard to be launched, Wijard V0.1 to be live, etc.

What Order page? What’s Wijard all About? See the links along the top.

If you’re seeing this while it’s the most recent post, thank you for being one of the first visitors to Wijard.

Where does a wijard live? With respect to the card aspect of the wijard, it lives in your pocket or bag until you give it out, at which point it lives wherever the people to whom you gave it keep the business cards they receive.

The more interesting aspect of the question relates to the widget aspect of the wijard. There are multiple files and locations involved. In this post, I list them, and use the founding wijard as an example. I started making the list for my own benefit, and am posting it here, tagged tech, in case it’s of interest to others. Given the somewhat techie nature of the Wijard V0.1 customer, that’s not completely out of the question.

• Clearspring, the widget platform on which Wijard is built. Each widget has a home page there.
• The code folder, which lives at Wijard.com, along with this blog. The folder itself includes some CSS and other files shared between wijards. Then each wijard has its own subfolder, containing the HTML file (wij.html) and two image (jpg) files. The larger (front.jpg) is a 500×200 pixel image corresponding to the front of the printed card; this is the file used in the widget itself. The smaller (thumb.jpg) is a 100×40 thumbnail.
• Multiple galleries: the Wijard Gallery blog, in which each wijard is featured in its own post; the Wijard group at Flickr; and other galleries as appropriate.
• Most important, your wijard includes your widget, and your can easily “launch” it onto any of your web sites from its post in the Wijard Gallery or its home page at Clearspring.

Our Who We Are page shows that we have a virtual legal counsel: Art Prior. We may one day need a real legal counsel, but for now, Art will say a few words about… art and the use of it on Wijards.

Be aware of who owns the images you use, and the rights they have over those images. If you use copyrighted images without permission, things can get very unnecessary!

A followup post will help you practice safe source when it comes to images for your Wijards.

This comparison of modes is itself a Clearspring widget, itself managed using Launchpad. It uses what Clearspring calls the In-Widget product (and I think of as the standard mode). It’s interesting to note that the CSS for this blog does not govern the widget; for example, as we move from this part of the post into the widget, we see the font change. I think that if I was using the In-Widget API (what I think of as advanced mode) I could have the widget inherit CSS from its context.

Do you have questions about Wijard not yet covered in the FAQ? If so, please comment on this post to ask those questions.

October 31 is a special day, and an even more special evening: Halloween. In 2008, October 31 is especially special: Wijard will be launched!

The minicard-ready image is due to: Justin, who took the original photo; Creative Commons, under which he made it available for remixing; Flickr, where he published it; and Picnik, with which I edited it.

I should point out that the image has yet to be Wijard-ized. It’s been cropped to the proportions of a minicard, but the crop has yet to be incorporated into a widget. As I said, launch is two days away…

The name Wijard is a mashup of widget and card. The widget platform is Clearspring. The cards are MOO MiniCards. That said, please note that this post describes the state of the Wijard just before launch, and that business cards and other products may well be available in the future.

Wijard lives at Bluehost. Most Wijard content, including the current post, is managed using WordPress, with some of the photo content managed using Flickr and edited using Picnik.

Behind the Wijard curtain are a bunch of other services, such as Backpack for lightweight organization and Highrise for contact management.

In order to map out Wijard – what it is, what it needs to include at launch, what will be added later – Mindmeister has proved very useful. In fact, the first post at this blog features a map created using Mindmeister.

You might have noticed that many of the above links are affiliate links. The WijardCo business model is based on affiliate programs and other partnerships. There are no current plans for ads.

Wijard Mindmap

This is a map of the wijard.com I have in mind as of a week before launch. You can see the annotations at the map’s page at Mindmeister.