One of the great new features in the new Notes 8.0.1 Client, is the “My Widgets” sidebar add-in. This enables web pages, or even Notes Views, to be easily rendered in a sidebar panel.
However because we are displaying information in a sidebar, we should endeavor to ensure that it’s content is concise and in particular, not too “wide” for a normally sized sidebar.
To my mind, the quickest and easiest way to achieve this for web pages, is to make use of readily available content, that has already been optimized for mobile devices and one such good example, is the mobile version of the highly addictive PlanetLotus. The following screenshot shows what it looks like once it’s been added:
So, to actually add our new PlanetLotus sidebar panel, we simply select the Get Started… option from the My Widgets sidebar panel drop-down menu, and leaving most of its Wizard screens at default, simply add the the URL of the mobile version of PlanetLotus (http://mobile.planetlotus.org), when prompted to enter the Web page by URL: as per the following example screenshot:
Then continue hitting Next on each of the remaining Wizard dialogs, until you have no option left but to Finish.
So now all that is left, is to open your newly created Widget (from the My Widgets panel) and use just it as you would any other sidebar panel. Hint: Once in the PlanetLotus panel, use a combination of the PlanetLotus preview hotspot and the backspace key to easily navigate around its content.
Enjoy!