Sue Waters

The pressure is on – two on my friends – Evil Sue and Frances – have both got into blogging at the same time…which I am really pleased about…:( but it’s like double trouble.

As Evil Sue post grab my attention first lets start with her. She ended her first post with “Good Sue said to use the easier blogger. But buggar that, what she can do, I can do better! Muwhahahahahah – bring it on!” Honestly at this point, I had thought she had finally lost it because “Girlfriend you are not even in the competition!“:) (If you have been following Sue and my exploits on my podcast site you will be aware that we are a bit competitive! – in a nice way).

So Evil Sue, over the past few days, has been struggling to learning how to use her edublog blog (I did warn her!) and is feeling very old at 34 as she realised the world has changed while her head was buried in work! However she has risen to the challenge and posted an excellent read on “Widgets, Widgets, Widgets” which made me investigate widgets more.

Poor Evil Sue, like most of us, is struggling to keep up-to-date with all this web terminology and widgets is a classic example. In simple terms widgets are mini web applications that you can put onto your website (i.e. blog, wiki, homepage). For example, the feed from my del.icio.us account in my sidebar is a widget. The following pictures are examples of widgets you can get for your site from Widgetbox (unfortunately I am unable to install any at the moment as most run on javascript and it has been disabled on WordPress blogs at the moment due to security issues – however these widgets will embed okay within wikis).

What makes matters confusing is that there are alternative names for Widgets (Other terms used to describe a Web Widget include Gadget, Badge, Module, Capsule, Snippet, Mini and Flake). Google is a classic example of this, they call their widgets gadgets, when you add stuff to your personalized Google homepage Google says you are adding gadgets. While as an end user, a names does not mean much to us (we just want to put cool things on our site that will interest people that visit our site), for a developer gadgets and widgets imply two different types of applications.

If you want to enhance your website then I suggest you check out the great selection of widgets at Widgetbox, with so many to choose from there is no way you will not fail to bling up your site. Interesting post on the Widgetbox Blog about what make a widget popular – social (built around what you want to share with your friends); personalized (it is your baby’s due date, your website or your blog, your videos, your playlist); simple and catchy.

From my point of view, the only problem with widgets, is I can not always embed the one I want in an edublog blog. Check out my cool animated glitter art on my wiki. So I have had to go with glitter words here instead!

While Evil Sue has an issue with the idea of a “widget week” because she is feeling overwhelm by all this technology. I think what a cool idea! I think it is time we all started blinging up our sites with cool widgets! Frances I will talk about in my next post (sorry Frances but this post is already too long!)