One thing about widgets that can be a bit of a pain to work with is the method of saving articles. Currently, most widgets utilize the chumby-provided email proxy to send articles.

I've been working on a small appengine-based proxy that gives the user a lot more flexibility. Notifications can be delivered by email, RSS, or even over Jabber/XMPP. Theoretically, it could be setup to post to other services such as intstapaper or facebook, or even an aggregate chumby widget! (Although that probably defeats the purpose...)

Once you get a widget API key, it is no harder to use than the chumby email proxy. It is even possible to gracefully fall back to chumby's proxy if something isn't working. You can see my example code to do this here

The project is very beta. Please don't abuse the system. That being said, you can check it out at http://chumby-dev.appspot.com . Log in with a google account to get started. You can then enter your information & set your notification preferences (or leave blank).

Widgets can be set up at the bottom of the page. Slugs consist of JUST alphanumeric characters and are like a name. URL is optional. After submitting, you will receive an API key.

Again, it's currently in a barely-usable state. I just wanted to throw it out there to see what people think.