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The Wolfram|Alpha Team

Introducing New Pre-computed Widgets for Your Blog and Website

June 15, 2011 —
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We have been working on making Wolfram|Alpha Widgets more customizable so that it’s easier for bloggers and webmasters to incorporate them in their sites and posts. We’re now pleased to share a few updates with you.

The most exciting new feature is the pre-computed “inline” widget. With these widgets, readers get computational knowledge from Wolfram|Alpha directly, without even clicking a button! As a new twist on the iframe-style widgets, you can now choose to hide or show the inputs as well as hide or show results right on the page as a streamlined addition to your own content.

Here are some examples:

This widget will give your readers the distance from New York City to their location. It pre-computes the distance based on the reader’s IP address. If users want to know the distance to NYC from another location, all they have to do is click the plus sign to open the widget input area, where they can enter a different starting location.

Or maybe you run a weather blog and want your readers to easily find their location’s forecast. This widget uses the readers’ IP addresses to produce weather information catered to their locations without leaving your site or even clicking a button.

See a Wolfram|Alpha Widget in our Widget Gallery or embedded in a blog or website, but really wish it was a different size or color? Not a problem! You can now customize other people’s widgets to match your formatting and style directly from the widget’s home page. Simply make your theme and output type selections, then copy and paste the updated embed code into your site.

Widget theme

Be sure to revisit the Wolfram|Alpha Widgets website and play around with all of the new changes! And remember to check back here for news on changes and updates to all Wolfram|Alpha resources. Have you already made a Wolfram|Alpha Widget using the pre-computed “inline” feature? Share a link here!

3 Comments

I think that plus sign is to small… Firstly I thought that you are talking about orange button on the bottom of widget. This is not intuitive…

Posted by Adrian M. June 15, 2011 at 3:41 pm

The input form fields are not showing up in IE 8 or IE9. The display fine in Firefox. Also, the color theme in grey shows up correctly in “preview”, but not in publish (text turns from black to white)

Thanks. The feature is great. Just needs to work in IE.

Posted by Patricia P June 16, 2011 at 12:49 pm

For many monthes I could not understand the idea of widgets when we have an access to a whole W|A… Looking for widgets which are created by W|A users I do not see these are very popular. In general ppl just eneter widgets building part, create an example and quit.

Now I think that widget idea for W|A might be reasonable for people who do not want to use power of W|A in full scale. There some users in many websites who need very specific info…

OK. I found that creating widgets is rather simple. But … could you do something with page encoding, especially in Russian? During widget creation this looks fine. However, in the final form the words are unreadable.

Why I think that is important. Part of ppl which W|A definitely lose is non-English speaking. Widgets in foregn languages would allow to attract that people.

Posted by Sv23 May 5, 2012 at 10:38 am