The idea behind goretexgearcorner.com was to create a microsite to provide helpful tips and market products to avid hunters. The main portal to the microsite is a viral widget placed around the Internet.

You can see the widget in context by scrolling really far down fieldandstream.com or outdoorlife.com.

I developed the widget using Adobe Flex 3. This widget is the first SWF I’ve developed in Flex. I have to say I was very impressed with the capabilities of Flex. The Accordion navigation container helped me to create this project quickly. I spent the majority of my development time skinning the widget and smashing bugs.

Speaking of bugs, the widget incorporated Gigya’s Wildfire. Wildfire is a nice little chunk of code that steamlines embedding widgets on a large number of social networking sites; it’s perfect for spreading a viral widget.

However, I had a horrible time working with Wildfire. The documentation is confusing and incomplete. Here are a few tips I learned the hard way.

1. Facebook.com does not allow iframes. You must embed the SWF with embed and object tags.
2. WordPress.com doesn’t allow embed or iframe tags. Gigya doesn’t explain how to put your SWF on WordPress.com well. WordPress recently introduced a tag to support Gigya. You must use WordPress’s [gigya] tag to embed your SWF.
3. Blogger.com allows iframes.
4. Myspace.com allows embed and object tags, but not iframes.

The other buttons may or may not work in the widget. Project timeline didn’t allow for me to test or debug all of them. We set the remaining buttons to the default iframe code and left the other social networks to catch as catch can.