Dress Up Your Blog With Widgets

Widget for blog is the mantra that is raging as a top favorite among the blogging fraternity. If anything, a nice piece of widget increases interactivity of a blog, and yes it does a bit of fizz and flamboyance as well. The good news is there is no dearth of widget for blog, and if you’re willing to spend a little of your time, you’ll be spoilt with choices.

But before that, let’s see what is a widget. And what it is that is so exciting about having one or more of it in your blog.

A widget, rather a web widget, is a small chunk of code, usually a JavaScript or a Flash Script, which when embedded in a blog or website, presents a fascinating array of interactive information. The code snippet of widget comes ready for use, and so there’s no need of any programming skill to get going.

For example, if you’re a MyBlogLog user, you get a JavaScript widget that shows who among MyBlogLog users are recent readers of a blog or website. Yet another widget shows outgoing links that are clicked by your visitors, updated hourly.

In my blog-site, Kolkata Musing, I use a Widgetbox widget that automatically stores the recent posts. What’s more, it offers readers a no-hassle ready option to include the widget of my posts in their website. Cool indeed.

Okay, what Widgetbox does is reading the rss feed of a blog, and presenting the latest entries in an eye-catching fashion. As the feed updates with addition of posts, so does the widget, wherever it may be residing.

This is pretty much the same what many other widget management systems offer, for example SpringWidgets, owned by the same company that owns MySpace. In fact if you’re using the syndicated content service of FeedBurner (now owned by Google) like this blog, you may use the syndicated feed to create a widget for embedding in any website.

Wordpress, the popular blogging platform, allows a wide variety of blog-related widgets, like calendar, recent posts, recent comments, and so on that can be chosen to be shown in the sidebar of the blog.

Yet another popular widget from WhoLinked, when placed in your website, allows you to see real-time all the incoming links to it.

Now that we’ve good idea about what a widget for blog can be, let’s see some of the popular widget management systems that are there to explore. Here’s a list of them about which the readers can find out more:

1. FunAdvice Widgets
2. Grazr
3. MuseStorm
4. Snipperoo
5. SpringWidgets
6. Widgetbox
7. Widgetoko
8. Widgets Lab
9. yourminis

A Note Of Caution

Some widgets you get to see in the sites above are so cool that you may feel inclined to include quite a few of them in your site. Better don’t. Not for any apparent reason, but for the fact that the script that accompanies each widget takes time to load fully, and if several of them are there, then your blog page will take lot of time to display its full content.

Remember you’ll normally have other JavaScript that are important for your blog. So, use widget for blog with care.