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.
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.
Are you thinking that the calendar you have on your sidebar is not enough? Are you looking for a different kind of widget to make it work to your advantage? Are you tired of seeing how ordinary and boring your calendar looks and behaves compared to those on the other blogs? Look no further. You have the King Calendar widget for WordPress.
The King of all calendar widgets!
It has features you won’t be able to resist:
- support for the Events Calendar Plugin
- four HTML fields available for customization
- set it to show up on any of the following pages:
- Home / Search / Archive / 404 page
- all pages or a special Page (just set the page_id or slug of where you want it to show up)
- all or special single Article (as with pages, just set where you’d like it to show by indicating the id or slug)
- all or special Category listing
- inside a special Category, List or Article
The nice thing with these features is that you could so much more with the Calendar. If for example, you have a category called Events (where you put the schedule of your events and maybe a bit of news), it would be nifty to have the calendar show up. Also, if you allow it display the Events (especially if you are using the Events Calendar Plugin), that is awesome. You don’t need to have so much trouble in setting it up.
Customizing your blog so that your calendar will be different, thanks to those additional HTML fields, is also a nifty thing. You can make sure that it would stand out or blend in on your page.
Download link.
Prerequisite: King widgets framework.
Would you like something soothing on your blog and still be widget-friendly so that you would not find it difficult to work with it? If so, there is the blue horizon theme by Kaushal Sheth. It is a predominantly blue and green theme and as such, you could feel the calm and cool aura of the theme.
Things to like about the theme:
- The cool and calm feel.
This is really amazing. The header image is that of rolling hill and you could see the clouds there too. Really soothing.
- Header navigation – you could put your links to your blog’s static pages there. Or a link to another blog you update regularly.
- Blockquotes – The style is cute. When you blockquote something, there are left and bottom borders, even for the ones nested inside those blockquotes. Really cute because you could distinguish the blockquotes from the rest of the posts.
- Fonts – sans serif and rounded fonts
- Categories and subcategories – They are indicated underneath the titles of the posts.
- Widget-friendly – This is definitely something positive about it.
This is one of the themes by Kaushal Sheth and it really looks quite usable. Any blogger could easily use it and feel at home with it. This theme might be quite good with blogs with themes that center on reflection like a parenting blog or maybe travelling, especially if you feel like the default header image reminds you of your favorite place to relax. You could view the testrun here. You could also download the theme from here.
GTalk, Google’s own instant messenger, has been around for a few years now, and more and more people are using it. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that businesses are using Google Apps more, so it follows that Gtalk becomes the instant messenger of choice.
We all have to admit, however, that Gtalk does have its downsides. For those of us who have been using another instant messaging client for years (Yahoo Messenger or MSN Messenger), the adjustment may not be welcome. Believe you me, though, the adjustment period does not take that long. And, with the improvements that Google is making, everything just becomes much more convenient.
Take for instance the new widget that allows file transfer in the web version. This file transfer feature has been available in the independent Gtalk client for quite some time now, but those who do not have the client installed know how frustrating it can be to have to attach a file to an e-mail rather than instantaneously transfer through the chat window.
Well, your frustrations are over. Late in March, Google added the functionality to the web version as well as Orkut. This means that you can use any computer, log on to your Google account, and transfer files using the chat window without having to create a new message.
Oh, I have to be clearer I think – this functionality is available through iGoogle chat and NOT the Gmail account. In the near future, though, this should also be available via your Inbox chat as well.
