Now anyone can have a website and they don’t need to know anything about HTML. That’s why we we see more and more blog, social profile, … and what came right after them : widgets. Widgets are third party items that can be embedded in your web page. There is also Desktop widgets and Mobile widgets, but we’ll only talk about Web widgets.
Here some nice places where you can get widgets for your blog, website and social profile:
Widget Box
The biggest collection of Web widgets. They also have a big section to help developer create their own widget. Since the widgets are from various organization, you can find any kind of widgets: News, chatrooms, jokes, games, recipes, calendar, mp3/video players, etc.
A lot of organization seems to use it to promote their own website. At the same time it can be like a RSS feed to some website. Per example, you can have a recipe widget which will give you some news recipes each day or you can have a news widget which will send you the latest headlines of the day. Just make sure you don’t put too many widgets on the same page and don’t let them be more important than your website real content.
The way it works: you choose your widget, customize it the way you want (the options are different per widget), then you can get the HTML code directly (which you’ll copy in your website) or choose where it should be installed (facebook, Blogger, MySpace, Hi5, etc.) and it will be done automatically after you specify your account name.
My Flash Fetish
You can get mp3 players to let your visitor hear your favorites songs or various others types of widgets. I didn’t find the others widgets very interesting, but the mp3 players are so nice! I specially like the little bear Meiko and the Old School Players. All of they widgets can be easily customized to your website colors. Their colors themes are from COLOURlovers (refer to the last post)! The bad points are that you can’t make the song not starting right away (can be annoying sometimes) and I don’t think you can resize the player.
So you just have to choose your players style, choose the colorts, add the URL of your songs (must be uploaded somewhere), when you’re done, they’ll give you some code that you must copy in your website.
WordPress Widgets
For bloggers who use Word Press like I do, there is a lot of widgets you can use. If you are running WordPress 2.2 or later, you do not need to install the Widgets plugin since widgets are now part of WordPress core. You just have to download them and upload them in your Word Press widgets folder. Then you go in the admin section of your blog under ‘Presentation’, you click on the tab ‘Widgets’ and you just have to drag and drop it from your widgets list. It’s a good opportunity to update! Go to Automattic to have more info on how to make your themes work with widgets and also how to make some yourself.
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