Internet Explorer 8 – How to add WebSlices for Wordpress

by Gary Illyes

Probably it’s just me, but I think the idea behind web slices are great. I feel the same as when RSS started to appear on the net: I get information way faster than the traditional way — going to the web site and see whether something has been updated–, RSS saves me a great deal of time.
WebSlices do the same but in a much more focused way. Take the following example: You release a book on Amazon for sale and want to see what others say about it in their reviews. What can you do? You do this: you open your browser, go to the page where the reviews are, scroll to the reviews and see what did change.

With WebSlices the above process looks like this: You subscribe to the webslice and when you want to see what happened on a specific page, you click a button which will face you with up to date information from that page. Like this:

The above example shows a WebSlice from Devoracles and it contains the titles of the latest posts. But it could show anything else as well; comments for a specific post, recent comments, list of the authors, list of the upcoming posts. Anything.

How to enable WebSlices on Wordpress

Enabling WebSlices basically on any website is extremely easy. So is on WordPress.
What you have to do is to surround what you want to display in the WebSlice in a, for example a DIV with a specific class name, hslice by name, and an ID of your choice.
Like this:

<div class="hslice" id="my_id">
I have content
</div>

You can also choose a title for what you want to display. Better said you have to provide it else the WebSlice won’t have a title. This can be achieved by putting another element in the above DIV, again, with a specific class name, entry-title.


<div class="hslice" id="my_id">
<span class=entry-title>I have title</span>
I have content
</div>


Where could you use this in Wordpress. The very first thing which popped in our mind was to display the most recent posts. To do this, you would insert something like this in your sidebar.php for example:

<div class=”hslice” id=”recent”>
<h2 class=”entry-title”>Recent Posts</h2>
<ul class=”entry-content”>
<?php wp_get_archives(’type=postbypost&limit=10′); ?>
</ul>
</div>
Should you want to learn more about WebSlices, here’s its documentation meant for developers: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc196992(VS.85).aspx

Too bad Mozilla and Google doesn’t support it, hopefully they will because it’s a very cool addition.