“You’re so 2000 and Late”- Black Eyed Peas from sushigurrl on YouTube
What is a widget? It’s a way to tuck code into your site and draw in content from other sites. On my site right now, I have, for example, a FriendFeed widget that will tell you the latest microblog posts that I have made. If you like my updates, you can come on over and follow me.
I was just reading Mashable’s new post 50 Great Widgets For Your Blog by Stan Schroeder. It’s an old post- recently resurfaced in a tweet in my stream- from 2007. So, some of these are still worthy of mention, but a lot have been updated or replaced outright.
That’s the problem with making any kind of widget or app list- today’s widgets’ little, smarter brother or sister is right around the corner waiting to wow the teacher and steal their thunder.
So here are a few of the widgets that I have used and liked, or seen on other people’s sites.
Mashable’s post mentions MyBlogLog’s recent readers. I had this on Bold Strokes and I liked it at first, but then it didn’t seem to be updating. I will try it again here and see what I think. It is interesting for other members to see each other at your site, and for you to see them too. Also available as a plug-in for WordPress.
So that’s pretty cool, although I am not so sure of its usefulness. Now- here is a really useful one: I can embed my music choices from blip.fm. Blip is a music service that allows you to choose “DJs” whose music you enjoy and thus build up a stream of music that should be tailor-made to your tastes. You can now inflict this upon your blog-readers with this widget- sign in, and off of the main page choose “embed.” Voila! A neat little player that rolls your music over to your readers (and can be paused as well).
I like a couple of general information widgets there too. I have a new Trulia widget- TruliaSnapshot- and I really like how it displays property for sale. Looks cool:
TruliaSnapshot
I also have a widget from the New York Times for national headlines, and one for more local news. I am interested in creating a blog with a community flavor and I think these add-ons help. I had to modify the Boston.com widget to fit the width of my sidebar, but it was an easy click to do that in widgetbox.com.
I wanted a recipe widget too- recipes are popular search items and would be useful on my blog, I think. I tried the Kraft widget which didn’t work in my site, then went over to widgetbox again. There I found a really cool one- in addition to giving out a recipe, you can type in whatever ingredients you have one hand (although, frankly, some days that would be, well, nothing) and the widget will suggest recipes from your input. So, as far as I am concerned, Meijer Mealbox widget is the winner here.
I also just changed a FriendFeed widget to one from retaggr.com that has all of my contact info throughout the few social media sites I use. You need to sign up and put your info into retaggr, and this takes a while, but after you can use the widget, you can add code to your email signature- a good way to link all of your contact information in one spot. The retaggr widget includes twitter updates.
Have fun! Going back to shave the rough edges off the blog!
