Announcing the Pelagios widgets

The Pelagios widgets are small applications that you can put on your website to allow users of your site to see data from Pelagios partners.There are two widgets, one to display information about places you mention on your site, the other allows people to search for information related to places.

Pelagios Place Widget 

The first widget is the Pelagios Place Widget. This is an icon with the Pelagios logo that you can add to your website. When you add it you specify a particular place in the Pleiades gazetteer and the widget will then provide information about that place.

Here is a screenshot of the icon which you can see after the link to Delphi.

When the user clicks on the icon, they then get information about Delphi from the Pelagios partners as well as relevant photos from Flickr.:

You can see a live demonstration of the widget for Corinth here by clicking on this icon:  (opens in a new tab or window). There is also  a live demonstration of the widget as an overlay for Corinth here along with demonstrations for a selection of other places.

There are various options when you embed the widget. For example, you can choose the whole widget to display immediately rather than via an icon which is clicked open, or you can choose for the map to not be displayed.

Pelagios Search Widget 

This consists of a search box. If you search for a place then it will show you all the matches for that place as a list and on a map. You can then click on each one to obtain data from Pelagios partners about each place.

Live demonstration of the search widget

How to embed the widgets 

You can add the Pelagios widgets to your site by adding a small snippet of HTML to your page. There are full instructions for embedding the widgets here.

Some sites, in particular most blogging and content management systems, have restrictions on the HTML you can add, and in particular will not allow you to add Javascript. For these, you can add the Pelagios Place Widget via an image and link, although the widget will open in a new tab or window. Hopefully at some point in the future we will be able to turn the widgets into Wordpress plug-ins, Google gadgets and other formats that may be able to help with this. .

Feedback 

We would warmly welcome and feedback on the widgets and suggestions for future work on them - please send any comments to me at j.culver@open.ac.uk. Please do also feel free to try embedding them on your sites and let us know if you have any problems or if the documentation could be improved.

More about the widgets 

There is much more information about the widgets on the Pelagios Widget pages and the source code is available on Github released under Gnu Public Licence v3. They were developed here at the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University.