David Chiu

I usually hate toolbars. They take up precious real-estate in the browser window, create a visual distraction and provide little benefit. But then recently I encountered Wibiya. I don’t remember what website I was on, but I noticed a toolbar fade-in at the bottom of the browser window. It looked well designed so I was curious as to what functionality it provided. As I clicked on the Recent Posts, Random Post, RSS, Share and Twitter buttons I was sold. The whole toolbar integrated very nicely with the site and provided cool ways to explore content on the site and share the content across social networks. I definitely wanted to know who developed this toolbar so I took a look at the source and found the Wibiya.com website.

Wibiya is still in Beta and is invitation only (you can signup for an invite), but I was lucky enough to be given an invite. Wibiya is a javascript widget which makes it easy to integrate into any website. The buttons on the toolbar and the theme of the toolbar are managed through the Wibiya website. The only thing I’ve noticed is that Wibiya has some layout issues when viewed through my new favorite URL shortener http://su.pr. The Wibiya toolbar gets shoved halfway below the browser status bar so it’s unusable. I’m guessing that the issue is with how Su.pr <FRAME>s the website and Wibiya is trying to calculate the height of the browser window and uses a height offset. So I’ve added the following jQuery code which only loads Wibiya when the site is not being <FRAME>d which will be 99% of the time.

          jQuery(document).ready(function() {
            if (top.location==location) {
                jQuery.getScript("http://toolbar.wibiya.com/toolbarLoader.php?toolbarId=5165");
            }
          });

Check out the Wibiya toolbar at the bottom of your browser and tell me what you think!
(If you don’t see a toolbar at the bottom of your browser but you DO see a black toolbar at the TOP of the browser, you’re viewing my site through Su.pr. To exit Su.pr click here.)

On a separate note: I wish Su.pr was implemented more like Wibiya and didn’t have to shove your site into <FRAME>s