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Frequently Asked Questions

General Information
Photo Gallery Widget
Live Activity Widget
Slideshow Widget
Tagcloud Widget
Content Widget
Business Services

General Information

Could you tell me a little more about Wowzio and the team?
Sure! Check out our about us page. For more info, please drop us a line at info [åt] wowzio [dot] com.
Are Wowzio's widgets free?
Yes, they are completely free for personal use by bloggers. We do require that you keep the 'Grab this Widget' and the 'by Wowzio' attribution links, found at the bottom of the widget. If you are a business, click here to find out more about our Business Services.
Can Wowzio's widgets be deployed on any blog/sites?
Yes. Any blog/site that is javascript enabled, can install Wowzio's widgets. Installation is done by simply pasting our javascript into your template. If your blog is hosted on wordpress.com ( i.e. your blog name is like http://myblogname.wordpress.com ), Wowzio widgets will not work, because wordpress.com strips off javascript from the embedded html.
Can I depend on the reliability and performance of the widgets?
Yes. Wowzio has been architected from the ground up to be a scalable, performant and reliable system, by a team that has expertize in building web scale performant systems. We understand that it is extremely important that Wowzio does not slow down the page loading time of a blog. Our frontend systems, along with our html, javascript and css have been build to be very responsive. There are multiple factors that affect page loading times, and we have made sure that we are following best practices, and serving up widgets on your blog( or site ) extremely fast. We provide complete transparency via our status page, including a link to the pingdom service that we use for systems monitoring. It also provides some details on how we use YSlow and other tools to evaluate our page loading times.
What is Auto-Fit? How does it help me?
Sizing your widget to fit the size of your side bar can be an annoying and error-prone process. To fix this, we introduce "Auto-Fit," a feature that sizes itself to the size of its container, automatically!

To accomplish this, we determine the width of the widget's parent container, and base the widget size on that. Currently, Auto-Fit automatically sets both the height and width. If you want to set a specific value for either one, you will not be able to use Auto-Fit.

Try it out, and send us your feedback or questions!
Can I customize the widget so that it looks like an integral part of my blog/site?
Yes, 100%. After you input the feed/rss url, we start you with a version of the widget which can be customized as per your needs. The theme, color, size and interactions can be configured, using Wowzio's WYSIWYG designer.
Can I change the look and feel of my widgets after I have installed them?
Yes. You can change the look and feel as often as you like. We provide a convenient "Grab this widget" link at bottom of each widget, that takes you to the your widget's Designer page.
How soon will my new blog post and associated images and tags get picked up by Wowzio?
Wowzio picks up new blog posts along with associated images and tags every hour.
After I input my blogurl, I get an error message "Unable to fetch RSS/Atom feed"?
Please make sure that your blog is public, and your blog's feed can be accessed by everyone.

Photo Gallery Widget

How does this widget help me?
This widget provides an elegant and simple way for users of your blog/site to discover the awesome content created by you. Each photo links back to it's corresponding blog post. This results in increased engagement of users on your blog, causing an increase in pageviews.
What is so special about this photo gallery widget?
Each photo from your blog is displayed in a nice grid, with rounded edges to give a polished feel. The grid can be set to a size of your liking, with m rows and n columns. This customization is quite powerful, as it allows you to place this widget in a place of your liking on your blog. You can also enable the auto-play feature on this widget.
After I copy/paste the code, do I need to do anything to make sure that the latest photos are picked by the widget?
Nope. We automatically pick up your latest posts and corresponding photos.
How many photos/images does this widget display?
Currently, this widget displays the last(most recent) 50 photos from your blog.
Can I create a slideshow from Flickr, Picasa Web or other photo sharing sites?
Yes. You can create a slideshow from just about anything that has an Atom/RSS feed.

Live Activity Widget

What is this widget and how does it work?
The Wowzio Live Activity Widget provides you and your users with a "live" feed of the visits to your blog or site. Everytime a page that the widget is on loads, we detect the user's location and the page they are coming from. This information is fed in real-time to every other widget open at that time, to give your visitors a rare insight into the vitality of your blog or site! We do not obtain nor store any personally identifiable information about the users that visit your blog/site.
How do I use or install this widget?
To use this widget, simply install it to any and every page whose activity you want included in the feed!
How does this widget help me?
This widget displays a live stream of users who are on the blog/site, along with where on the blog/site they are, as well as their geo-info ( city/state/country ). It updates in real-time, so a visitor to the blog can see the activity taking place on the blog/site in real time. This gives users a livelier feel for the blog/site, as well as a good sense of the community thats currently interacting with the blog/site.
Is there a way to view older activity?
No, we currently do not provide for a way to view older activity. You are free to make the activity widget really long, so it displays the 15 most recent users and their activity.
How is a user's location determined?
We use a IP-to-location software library from a 3rd-party, which when given a user's IP-address as input, returns that user's location (city,state,country). It is not 100% perfect, but is usually fairly accurate.
Is there a way to disable my own activity/trail on this widget?
No, we currently do not provide for a way to do that. We do dedup each user's activity, what that means is that if a user goes to the same page again, that activity is deduped out.
When on the Wowzio website, how is the activity widget displaying visitors to my blog/site?
On the Wowzio website, we run a simulation to give you a feel of how the widget will look once its installed on your blog/site, i.e. the visitor data is dummy. But once the activity widget is installed on your blog/site, it will start displaying real/actual visitor's data.
Can someone hack my activity widget?
No. We have put safeguards in place to prevent it from happening.
Can someone get into my email account via this widget?
Web email systems have implemented robust security measures, and only allow access to an inbox, when a user has the right combination of username & password.

Slideshow Widget

How does this widget help me?
This widget provides an elegant and simple way for users of your blog/site to discover the awesome content created by you. Each photo links back to it's corresponding blog post. This results in increased engagement of users to your blog, causing an increase in pageviews.
After I copy/paste the code, do I need to do anything to make sure that the latest photos are picked by the widget?
Nope. We automatically pick up your latest posts and corresponding photos.
How many photos/images does this widget display?
Currently, this widget displays the last(most recent) 50 photos from your blog.
Can I combine feeds from multiple sources/blogs into one slideshow widget?
Yes. You can enter up to 15 feeds, simply click on the "Add Another feed" and it will open up a new text field where you can input an additional feed-url, in the Wowzio Builder.
Can I create a slideshow from Flickr, Picasa Web or other photo sharing sites?
Yes. You can create a slideshow from just about anything that has an Atom/RSS feed.
I do not like my images being put in these slideshow widgets. What should I do?
The slideshow widget should be considered a distribution mechanism for your blog, since the images point back to the original page it was posted on. That said, if you do want us to block creation of the slideshow widget for your blog, pl. send an email to info [at] wowzio [dot] com.

What are the benefits of the tagcloud widget?
The tagcloud widget helps bubble up the rich content that is deeply embedded in blog posts. When a user clicks on a tag, we display the matching blog posts inside the tagcloud widget frame, thus keeping the user on the same page ( and in the same context ).
How is the tagcloud for my blog computed/build?
Wowzio extracts tags from your blog posts in the following fashion:
- a. If a blog post is tagged/categorized using the native tagging/category system of your blogging platform, these tags are extracted.
- b. If a blog post contains Technorati tags embedded in it, these tags are extracted.
- c. If a blog post does not contain native tags, nor Technorati tags, Wowzio extracts tags using Yahoo's Term Extraction API, one of the APIs provided by Web Services by Yahoo!
For each tag, we factor in its recency, frequency and placement, and assign it a score accordingly. Finally, we order the tags by their score, and pick the top tags to display in the tagcloud widget.
After I copy/paste the code, do I need to do anything to make sure that the latest tags are picked by the widget?
Nope. We automatically pick up and extract new tags from your latest posts, and update the tagcloud within minutes.
I have heard that tagcloud building is computationally intensive, will the tagcloud widget take a long time to render on my blog?
Yes, building a tagcloud is computationally expensive. And no, the tagcloud widget will not take a long time to render on your blog. We have architected the tagcloud system, such that the expensive computation happens asynchronously. So when it comes time to render the tagcloud widget on the blog, we return back in a very small amount of time (under 1 second).

Content Widget

How does the Content Widget help me?
The content widget is a syndication and content distribution mechanism. You can aggregate feeds from multiple sources ( upto 15 ) into one widget. You can use it for cross-promotion of content, or syndication via 3rd party channels.
Can I combine feeds from multiple sources/blogs into one widget?
Yes. You can enter up to 15 feeds, simply click on the "Add Another feed" and it will open up a new textfield where you can input an additional feed-url, in the Wowzio Builder.