MyAnimeList.net (MAL) is a pretty slick specialty social networking service which focuses on anime and manga.
Wikipedia describes it as follows:
The site primarily functions to serve as a place for users to keep track of the anime and manga they’ve watched or read in a highly-organized and stylized list format. In addition, MyAnimeList connects users who share similar tastes, and provides personalized suggestions and a comprehensive source of information on anime and manga.
Here is a simple blog widget for MAL which I developed using Microsoft Silverlight.
It pulls your RSS feed from your MAL profile page, and formats it nicely to let your blog visitors see what anime have you been watching recently. It also loads the anime images from MAL and displays it nicely for each entry.
Installation is pretty straightforward. Just copy the following HTML code into a text widget in your blog. Don’t forget to replace [your MAL user name] with your own MyAnimeList user name!
If you are encountering problems with the above method, an alternative (and possibly simpler) way to deploy the widget for your own blog is to use an iframe:
Remember, your blog visitors will need to have the Silverlight browser plug-in installed in order to see the widget. If Silverlight is not installed, the widget will prompt them to install it.
Here are a few customization options:
- You can control the widget’s height and width by changing the numbers in the style attribute of the main div tag. If you are embedding the widget within a blog post or page itself (like this page), you can also make it float by adding a float: right or float: left to the style.
- Here are the widget parameters which you can configure:
- myAnimeListUser (Mandatory) – This is your MAL user name.
- itemCount (Optional) – This is the number of RSS feed items you want to display in your widget. If you don’t provide a value, the widget will use all the information that your RSS feed provides.
- thumbnailSize (Optional) – This is the width in pixels of the thumbnail images. Defaults to 100 if no value is provided. The blog widget will automatically scale the images while maintaining the correct aspect ratio.
- urlTarget (Optional) – This specifies the url target name used for opening hyperlinks from the widget. Similar to the HTML target attribute, valid values include “_self”, “_parent”, “_top”, and “_blank”. Defaults to “_self” if no value is provided. urlTarget will automatically be set to “_parent” if you are using the iframe method above to embed the blog widget.
If you are using the object method to deploy your widget and you are providing multiple widget parameters, separate them using a comma like this in the value string for the initParams parameter:
If you are using the iframe method to deploy your widget, you will put the multiple widget parameters as separate request parameters in the iframe source URL, like this:
You can download the latest Visual Studio 2008 project files for the MyAnimeList widget here.
To install the Microsoft Silverlight browser plug-in (or to check whether your browser already has Silverlight installed), go here.
Other Silverlight resources:
- Microsoft Silverlight Overview – http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/
- Silverlight Community – http://silverlight.net/