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Are you using WordPress as a CMS and a blogging app? If you are and you are wondering how to make sure that the readers of your blog would feel that each of your posts and articles would have specific ‘weights’ in terms of special articles, regular ones and asides, you could actually set it up using Musil as your theme. The good thing about it is that it’s a really simple looking theme that would not make you feel too overwhelmed.
Positive points for Musil:
- Distinguish the different kinds of entries that you have.
Maybe you have things you consider as ‘special features’—how should these appear on your site? Having them appear differently from the rest would be good so that people would have that clue that they are there as special features.
- Asides are really seen as asides.
If you’re someone who wants to put sidenotes, no need to worry about how to fiddle around much. Seems like sidenotes work without a hitch here.
- Widget support
Whether you are a newbie in blogging or a pro, you could customize your blog further through the use of widgets. There are some widgets that are automatically included in this theme and you just need to activate them. The widgets are: Related Posts and Scrobbler. Check out the plugins so you could activate them, as needed.
People are getting more and more conscious about how readers would benefit more from the layout of their individual blogs. Musil is definitely one of the themes that think about such factors as well as the usability of it from the user’s perspective. Maybe if you are someone who simply needs to know what would work out of the box and have a nice theme to look at at the same time, this is an option you could choose. If you’re running a news and features blog, you might also want to check this out or even modify it.
Dr. Mike’s blog widgets are simple and nifty. You just have to check them out!
Quote of the Day Widget
Are you into quotes? You would definitely love this widget. There are so many quotes that you could pull from the Internet. It so happened that this widget got it from The Freedictionary site. You would see the quote of the day, as well as the accompanying image.
This Day in History Widget
Like the Quote of the Day Widget, this is accompanied by an image. If you are a history buff, you could definitely activate this widget.
Dr. Mike has actually made a set of widgets based on the contents of freedictionary.com. The Word of the Day, In the News would also be included in this set of widgets. After all, they have all come from the site. What is great about this set of widgets is that they also work on WordPress MultiUser installs. So if you have WordPress MU installed on your server, you and the other users could use them without much of a hitch. Another good thing about these widgets is that you don’t have to worry about any configurations. You could set the header texts so that you are not stuck with the default ones. When it comes to this day in history, you could be as creative as “Back to the past” or “Backtracks.” For the Quote of the Day widget, you could use “Who said what” as a text for it.
Dr. Mike made use of RSS in the creation of these widgets. Maybe you want to make your own if you don’t quite like the sources he has used for these widgets. It is time to check in to the code and see how things work. Well, if you feel too intimidated, maybe you could ask help from a friend who is into programming.
Bookworm? Love sharing your books online using Library Thing? Or maybe you haven’t even thought of doing that until recently? Either way, here are some funky widgets for you and your book-loving friends.
Library Thing has two widgets. One of them is to display your collection. The other allows others to search through your book collection. Obviously you have to be a user of the Library Thing service before you even think of using these widgets on your blog.
Library Thing is your online catalog. Why would you like to have one? Well, for one it helps you organize your book collection. For another you don’t have to be a librarian to do it because you can even make your own set of tags. After all, you have a particular collection anyway.
Moving on to the widgets themselves, they are easy to generate. You only need to go to their respective widget pages and click on the settings you would like. You could choose the colors for the search widget so that it will blend in with your blog layout and colors. And don’t worry about not knowing the hexadecimal values if you don’t know it because you can click the colors your widgets would use. Also, you could create a widget that would show your books at random, or maybe your collection could show up as a tag cloud. No matter how you would like to customize it, you have the options just there on the page. And there’s no need to worry about it being exclusive for WordPress. You could use it on practically any blog that allows you to add Javascript. You don’t even need a full-blown blog tutorial to use this widget. You could simply follow the instructions on Library Thing.
This is perfect for blogs that talk about books. All those book covers will also appear on the widget if you set them that way. Maybe you could even schedule your blog entry postings so that you could use the recent books option and review those recent books on your blog at the same time! What are you waiting for? Go to Library Thing, sign up and get those widgets 
The widgets I have seen so far are mainly on the sidebar of the blogs. Although you could play around with the positions of the widgets by dragging and dropping them wherever you like, I first encountered something like that with Canvas.
What is Canvas?
Canvas (from Fresh Pursuits) is something you could use to customize your WordPress blog without knowing anything about PHP and CSS. Blogging newbies are welcome to try this! It was a really interesting experience. You could have your layout in this admin interface and you have blocks and blocks of your layout in front of you. You could also add similar elements by drag and drop too. And you just need to click the particular block to customize it. You even have a color palette so you could easily choose colors that you want for your blog.
Why widgetize themes when you have Canvas?
I didn’t totally love the way Canvas worked. It is nice in the sense that you could easily drag and drop ‘boxes’ into your layout and customize them. I think it was mainly working with the Ink part/color palette that I didn’t like much. In any case, at least having themes that are widgets ready would make it easier to somehow manage. Especially if you are using WordPress MU to manage your blogs. That way you could let each blogger on your server to tweak their blogs to their hearts’ desires as long as you have themes that allow that.
Also, it could sometimes be easier to modify by hand the CSS of your WordPress theme. So if you already have widgets, you’re one happy blogger who will customize as the entries come and go.
Maybe there were already widgets before Canvas came out. I don’t really know for sure. All I know is that they both make customizing blogs so much fun and easier too!
Inspiration is something you would like to have and why not make sure everyone who reads your blog would have a similar experience? Well, worry about that no more because there is a Daily Painters widget for your blog! Great news, huh? Yes! You could actually get it here.
This widget actually works for a lot of blogs, not just WordPress powered blogs so those of you who have non-WordPress using friends could share the joys of having blog widgets with them. You just need to generate the HTML code that you would like to have on your blog.
Configuring the widget
This widget is something that you don’t configure on your WordPress Dashboard. You configure it before you even generate the code for your blog. Select the color for the text and the border, as well as the background color. You might like to choose colors that go well with the overall color scheme of your blog. However, your colors are limited to the following: black, white, gray, aqua, blue, fuschia, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, yellow.
Once you have already selected the colors, you can copy the code generated and paste it on the sidebar.php file of your WordPress theme or look for the sidebar code on your blog template. (Not sure what a blog theme is? You could check out these blog tutorials.)
Good points of this blog widget:
- You get really interesting images, which are different paintings) at random.
- You could use this for any kind of blogging software that allows you to tweak your template.
- It is a simple to use to widget. (Just copy and paste!)
Not-so-good points of this blog widget:
- It uses a table to display it. (If you are biased towards a purely CSS layout, this could be such an eyesore, sticking out of the theme or template code.)
- You are limited to the colors indicated.
- You don’t have much control on how slow or fast the images would change on the widget.
In any case, it is still an interesting blog widget to have. If you love looking at paintings and images to inspire you or maybe soothe you, it is worth looking at. You would just have to weigh out the pros and cons of this blog widget, considering what you’d like on your blog of course.
If you have been blogging for quite a while already, you know that your archives section is already quite overwhelming. Sometimes you might feel like highlighting your previous entries but it’s just too much of a hassle or it might be too difficult to dig them up because of the number of entries. In any case, you could actually check out this widget called Around This Date in the Past. It is based on the following plugins:
“One year ago” plugin
Wayback plugin
Wayback widget
“Around this date in the past” plugin
Default settings:
It shows a list of a week’s worth of entries that were posted around a year before the current date.
What you could set:
Title of the widget
Number of days’ posts before and after a year ago that will appear
Mode of the widget.
Mode 1: get posts around this date from ?X? years ago.
Mode 2: get posts around this date for the last ?X? years.
Mode 3: get posts around this date since year ?X?.
Limit of number of posts to be retrieved
That makes the widget really fun to use. After all, you could have three modes to choose from when it comes to diplaying past entries.
Here’s another good reason to use this plugin: It creates more internal links. A rather good tactic for search engine optimization. Maybe that would convince you to use this widget if you have not really thought of a practical use for it. Either way, it is an interesting plugin. Just grab it so you could enjoy using it already.
Note: The creator’s blog is mainly in Spanish but try posting comments about it anyway in case you have difficulty in using it. There are English versions of the plugin page so you shouldn’t worry too much. 
It looks like people are constantly seeing how useful WordPress widgets could be. Considering the download stats. that is. You could see the spike in the graph when it was initially released in late March. What is it about widgets that people can’t help but use them?
WordPress widgets make your blog more visually appealing and also more interactive and informative. You have all these kinds of widgets that interact with other sites like Library Thing and Squirl. You can even include Google Gadgets on your blog so that you have games on it. Even horoscopes are available for your widget (thanks to Patrick Chia). Considering how easy it is to use these widgets, no wonder people keep on downloading and installing them. And without the widgets plugin, this is simply not possible.
Aside from that, development of WordPress widgets and plugins are still on-going. Seems that this avenue for creating widgetized versions of plugins and widget-friendly themes makes people all the more interested. Each of us would like to make our blogs fancier or more reader-friendly and as such we dare experiment with so many things.
Then again, widgets is not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea. Some people like their blogs as they are. Just the entries, archives and calendar. But now that blogs have evolved to be some kind of content management system for different purposes, you can’t help but be so amazed at everything that has happened and everything people have done to improve it. Who says blogging is just for geeks? Who says otherwise? There’s something in blogging for everyone and it might be the way for people to see creativity in everyone, be it in a geeky way (because of the development of widgets and plugins) or because of the ways they could use their blogs.
Text widgets are probably what some people would consider as useless or not so cool. Think again! These text widgets might be the ones you could really use more often than not!
The WordPress Widgets plugin has the text widgets there by default. There are other text widgets that are available online. Some of them are even capable of better things liek inserting HTML and PHP. It’s really interesting.
Funky things you could do with the text widget:
- Adding information about you.
Maybe if you have your blogger code or your geek code, you could put there. Or a brief biography.
- Adding information about your blog.
Just a little snippet so first time visitors would be able to see what your blog is all about and get their attention.
- Adding a poem.
If you have a poem that basically says what your life philosophy is, why not add it using the text box widget?
- Instant status reports.
If you just want quick updates on your sidebar as to your status, you could place them using the text widget. Hmmm. Maybe for example you’re hooked on to watching Iron Chef or playing some game, you could add something like “Currently addicted to (whatever thing or show)” on it. Nifty, right?
There are so many other things you could do with the text widgets. Only you could limit yourself as to how creative you can get on your own blog. If you would like to learn a bit more of the basics, of blogging you could check out some blog tutorials. That way you could decide on what you would do with your own blog and figure out what widgets would be suitable.
That is an example of how the horoscope widget would output your zodiac sign’s daily horoscope.
It’s written in the stars, as some people would say. As such, they’d like to know what their horoscopes are every single day! Oh boy, it’s not just enough to look at it from the newspaper. You just have to share it with everybody else who is reading your blog! It’s part of the fun and for some people, the paranoia that the stars are conspiring against you.
Patrick Chia has a plugin for those who would like such a thing on their blogs. This WordPress geek seems to have a lot of widgets on his projects page. Anyhow, the horoscope widget gets the daily horoscope from Evled.com’s horoscpe section.
Good things:
You could have a cute header text describing that section of your blog. You could have something like “Signs and wonders: A Gemini’s daily horoscope” or “Written in the stars for Aries” or even “Zodiac Crazy Scorpio.” Nice, right? It would be easy to fit in your blog’s overall look and feel.
You could easily just select your zodiac sign from the drop-down list when you customize it from the Presentation; Sidebar Arrangement; Widgets part of your blog. If you’re not certain what your zodiac sign is, there’s no need to worry. The dates are included in the list, just right beside the particular zodiac sign. Nifty huh?
The not so good things:
Wouldn’t it be better if there’s an image associated with the zodiac signs? In newspapers, it’s easy to find the zodiac signs because of the symbols included.
If you don’t like the source of the horoscopes, you can’t really change it unless you can tweak the widget itself so that you could have a different source.
Don’t you just love these widgets? Whether you’re a blogging newbie or a problogger, you sure could play around with them!
Do you have a way with words? Or maybe even a great fascination for them? If you’re a word geek, show the world by adding the associative dictionary widget on your sidebar! I first saw on it giagia.co.uk and I simply was intrigued. After all, it said on the sidebar “GiaGiaDictionary” so I just had click the words. Some of them have definitions already, some don’t.
As the description of it goes:
...it adds a dictionary to your site and displays words from it through ajax calls. All the words in the description are links themselves, so you can keep wandering through the words. If a word has no description, a small form is displayed to make one up.
Interactive fun!
The Associative Dictionary could be quite fun. If you have people visiting your blog and happened to be intrigued by your ‘dictionary,’ they would probably start checking out the different words in the definition you have. It seems as though GiaGiaDictionary has quite a number of words already so with each time I click and add my own definitions of words, I get new ones. It is quite addictive as I don’t notice how many words I gave definitions to or how many words I have checked out definitions of.
Stumped?
If you don’t seem to have a nice definition for certain words, you could always click the back button and you will get back to the word you were checking out. If you feel like adding some definition to the word selected, go ahead and just write your own definitions. It certainly is fun because sometimes you would see other people’s biases and backgrounds through the definitions they add. If you are currently in another country like Japan, wouldn’t it be fun if you let your Japanese friends add their own definitions in your Associative Dictionary? That was you get to interact in some ways.
About the creator
You could get this from the dirkie.nu blog. It seems that it is his second plugin. The creator has his own associative dictionary but it is in the Dutch language, not English.
