Wordpress Widgets

What is it?

Although the word widget might look a bit funny it has become a commonly used term, especially among bloggers utilizing the world-famous Wordpress software.

The term 'Wordpress widgets' is applied to any user-friendly sidebar function in Wordpress themes including such elements as search box, meta-tags, RSS feed links, recent posts, categories, etc. which can be arranged by a blogger into the blog's sidebar in any way they want.

The majority of modern Wordpress themes are widget-ready, i.e. users can modify them without having to change the code. You just log in as the administrator and drag the elements you want to the sidebar adding and rearranging them whenever you wish.

Wordpress is in itself a very easy-to-use blogging application, and with the addition of widgets it has become even more user-friendly providing for a most pleasant blogging experience.

Where to find

There are numerous websites offering widget-ready themes for Wordpress, but the most extensive collection of them can be found at the official website of Wordpress. You will be offered a widest selection of blog templates arranged by color, width, sidebars on the left and on the right side, rounded and unrounded corners and so on.

Some of the Most Popular Wordpress Widgets

There are many widgets for Wordpress. You will find some of them more useful than the others and by experimenting with them you can come up with a most useful widget set that will make blogging even more fun. Your choice will depend on your personal needs and taste, but there are certain widgets that are so popular within the blogging community that they've become a 'must have' for almost every blogger.

ExecPHP

It is a text-box widget that allows inserting PHP code into your sidebar.php and executing it by means of an easy click-and-copy operation rather them having to modify it manually.

IM Online

This Wordpress widget allows you to display your online status to your blog readers with the help of instant messaging services such as MSN, Google Talk, Skype and others. Thus you can easily let your readers know when they can contact you.

With the dramatic increase in Wordpress users it has become rather hard to make your blog stand out against thousands of other blogs built with the same platform. However, the addition of widget-ready themes creates a unique opportunity to develop unique blog designs with just a couple of click-and-drag operations.

What Are Interactive Apps and Widgets?

We live in a world today in which internet has exploded tons of information which can be accessed with the help of certain man made application programs by the names of interactive apps and widgets.

Interactive apps essentially speed up business processes to a great extent. These are development tools with which a developer creates internet applications. Some examples for interactive apps are Flash, Adobe etc. which help to increase web traffic to specific sites portraying state of the art technology.

In addition there are interactive apps that can be customized according to the needs of the user to share business intelligence. These multipurpose apps are called Dashboard applications. These contain tabs that help to share reports on any network.

Interactive apps and widgets have in fact brought the world closer through the World Wide Web. With the help of these online applications, it is now possible to see and learn the contents of any extensive course from any institution or university of your choice located in any part of the world.

Widgets are applications into which chunks of codes have been embedded into. They can be placed in any third party site which allows the user authorship rights. You can locate plenty of them on social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut etc. Suppose you want stock updates on your homepage in your website, a stock update widget may be placed on a web page and clicking on it will get you the latest in stock prices directly from a stock market site. It's also possible to access the same data from another location by simply copying the embed code and pasting in the site of your choice.

There are mainly two types of widgets namely web widgets and desktop widgets. It's the web widgets that are extensively used in SEO processes not to leave out back link campaigns. Widgets are developed using software programs such as JavaScript, HTML, Flash etc and function as downloadable applications. They are generated by widget engines like Widget Box, Snack Tools etc. Desk top widgets on the other hand can be embedded in local computers only. For example: - Apple Computer Widget.

Today there are numerous widget companies offering various management tools for controlling these embedded applications. Their use has become so widespread that you can even find them inside mobiles which are known as mobile web widgets.

Interactive Apps & Widgets on your web page can greatly improve your traffic and subscribers. Click here to know more about Interactive Apps & Widgets

Will Widgets Invade Your Desktop?

Computers have an interesting way of stealing your time in small increments.

What do I mean?

Ten minutes of spam sorting per day equates to over 60 hours a year deleting email.

Five minutes per day spent looking for your to-do list comes out at over 30 hours a year of unproductive time.

Thought to represent the saviors of our lives, computers actually eat up our time in tiny, almost imperceptible bytes.

As the computer world grows increasingly complex, anyone or anything that removes clutter from your desktop (or your mind), save you time, or eliminate effort rates a closer look.

The answer to increased productivity and micro-time management may not lie in "bigger and better", but in "smaller and specialized."

Widgets, small specialized programs that typically run in the background while you do other things on your computer, may just hold the key to claiming back those lost seconds and minutes that add up over time.

Instead of trying to represent the "end all and be all" of software programs, "widgets" typically solve one - and only one - problem.

Whether it's managing a to-do list, computer performance, activity tracking or managing your calendar, widgets can solve the little problems that add up quickly.

Side Note: As always, when installing unfamiliar software from the Internet, backup all sensitive files, update your anti-virus, turn on your spyware detector software and generally heighten your awareness of what's taking place on your computer.

Log on to http://widgets.yahoo.com for a growing library of free widgets you can download and use right away.

However, to use the widgets you must install Yahoo!'s Widget Engine, which makes the whole process a bit cumbersome.

I would much prefer each widget stand on its own as an individual installation.

Also, Yahoo!'s organization of their widget library leaves a lot to be desired as it takes quite some digging to uncover some of the real gems.

To their credit, Yahoo! seems to be actively promoting third-party development of widgets which they in turn help distribute.

Log on to http://desktop.google.com and see Google's answer to widgets with their "Google Gadgets," a collection of handy little apps designed to help you out with little tasks.

Probably the best offering for increased productivity is the Google Calendar V2 (though it apparently carries no reminder feature).

Like Yahoo!, you can't run the gadgets without Google's software installed.

Though most of the widgets you'll find at these sites are not business related, they represent a trend toward micro-specialization in software development.

Solving one problem for a small group of people (niche audience) instead of trying to solve every problem for a huge group of people -like major software developers - makes a lot of sense.

I believe this represents a trend that will spill over into the mainstream once a viable profit model develops.

Once people figure out how to make money with these "widgets" or "gadgets," you'll see an explosion of mini-software applications performing a myriad of tasks people wonder how they previously ever got along without them.

Copyright (c) 2007 Jim Edwards

Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the co-author of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how to use fr^e articles to quickly drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website, affiliate links, or blogs... Need MORE TRAFFIC to your website or affiliate links? "Turn Words Into Traffic" reveals the secrets for driving Thousands of NEW visitors to your website or affiliate links... without spending a dime on advertising! Click Here =>http://www.turnwordsintotraffic.com

How to Create Desktop Widgets With Yahoo

This will be my first foray into the world of widgets. I am more of a traditional programmer and I use javascript under extreme duress. Therefore I was never attracted toward the field of widgets or gadgets for that matter. If you want to have a look as to what are widgets please visit yahoo site.

Moving on to requirements for this kind of development

Widget engine, Yahoo calls it Konfabulator. (don't ask me why, I have no idea). Get Yahoo SDK Download SDK. After the download just install it and you are ready to go.

The secondary requirement is a good text editor, Yahoo uses XML and javascript to design widgets thus, I would suggest finding a good XML and Javascript editor. If you are confused please download the visual studio free edition, i think it will be sufficient for your requirements. On this point I am open to suggestions.

Download the reference manual from the Yahoo site. Click here to download a zip which has the manual in pdf format.

Image editor, you will need a good image editor to design your widget backgrounds and the UI in general thus please buy or get an image editor which is as good as Gimp or Photoshop. The following list has been provided by my readers thus I have no idea how good these softwares are but I know that these are free.

Photoscape Download

Gimp for windows Download

Serif PhotoPlus Download

Beside these software's you need to have basic understanding of XML and Javascript. These tutorials will not try to teach you either of these two subjects.

The main file which is executed has an extension of kon. This you say is like the exe file under the windows environment. The kon file is not a standalone exe but a file which is used by the konfublator. Once the Konfabulator engine is installed on your system as soon as you double click on any kon file the engine will start and the file will be executed. All these steps will be outline in my video tomorrow on the you tube. If you have any questions feel free to drop me a line

Creating the background

For your widget lets build a small background graphic file. I am not trying to create anything complicated to begin with thus the background file will be an image of 200*200 pixels. The base color is transparent thus it will not obstruct anything and there are three- four shapes. The name of the file is back1.png

Widget Background

Creating the program

Lets fire up our favourite text editor and create a file called helloworld.kon. The basic syntax is like a xml file. therefore it must start with the following line just like an XML file

The First Line Of An XMl File

These files have the basic element as Therefore let us create the basic skeleton of the file

Basic Widget Skeleton

Every widget element must have a window element inside it therefore we must define a window which would be the visible portion of your widget. As we all know every window must have a name, title, height and width in the same way we must define these attributes. Again it is upto to you if you want these as attributes of the window element or child of window element. Personally I prefer the latter.

For the background Image create any graphics and store it in png format

As you can see we have defined all the properties the last property that we must add is the image property which will show the background of the window. Lets put in the image element.

RSS1My First Widget400300true

One important point is the files should be in the same path, because we cannot be sure as to the file system of the user thus if you save your widget in a folder called mywidgets then save the image either there or make a sub-directory such as images or resources to save the image files.

As is customary there must be a hello world message somewhere, thus lets put in the text, in yahoo widget this is also an element called text and attributes like data, color,font etc.

Text Element Inserted

By default the text will be printed on the extreme left i.e 0,0 position. If we want to move the text we must give the voffset and hoffset values. Basically these values will move the text vertically and horizontally from the 0,0 position by the amount of pixels you specify. I have placed the text 100 pixels down and 50 pixels to the right.

RSS1My First Widget400300trueResources/widget.pngNDTV Top News5010016#ff4499

Lets save this and try to execute it. If everything has been installed properly and the file has been written properly, your Desktop should show a security message, just click use widget.

There you have it, your first widget, if you want to close it just left click on it and choose close widget.

Tomorrow I will show you how to put some functionality in this widget, hopefully I will have a video ready too.

You can read more about widgets and gadgets at my blog http://best-news-site.com/ or watch my videos on youtube search for MrBestProfessor videos

How to Integrate Dashboard Software Widgets Into Your Mac OS X

The Dashboard software system is designed to make the user's experience in making use of the Mac OS X more enjoyable and convenient with the addition of applications, known as widgets, into the main screen for easy accessibility. But before you can make full use of the program, you must know and understand how to integrate Dashboard software widgets into the system first.

This system is meant to give you, the user, easy and efficient access to the different applications that are installed into your Mac OS. Although these applications are automatically installed into your operating system from the time it is programmed into your computer, these do not automatically appear on the main layer after installing the Dashboard. Thus, you must first manually install and arrange your applications before you can use them through the same.

First are the basics. The applications that are to be used with the Dashboard are called widgets. This is a small-sized program that functions in a variety of ways, such as letting you know the time, the date, the weather forecast, or even stock market trends. These can be found with a lot of other functions. There are also widgets out there that can be used to play mini-games when you feel too stressed to continue working on your computer. All of these are kept and arranged in your Dashboard, which functions much like the Desktop of the Windows operating systems. To display all your widgets, all you have to do is to click on the Dashboard icon. This will reveal to you all the widgets that you have installed and arranged according to your preference.

You can download widgets off the Internet for use with your Dashboard. Just search for them with the use of search engines, such as Yahoo and Google. Once downloaded, you must locate the file in your system. The usual place where these are saved is the main screen. These widgets will usually appear as compressed files that may require you to have decompression software or application on your computer to access it. Once decompressed, the widget will usually install itself on your computer system.

Once installed, you must double click on the icon of the widget. Doing so will open up your Dashboard, with it asking you if you want to keep the widget. Clicking on the keep button will place your widget on the Dashboard, ready to be used. The next step to do is to customize your widget. This can be done by bringing up the Dashboard and clicking the manage widgets button. This is shaped like a plus sign and is usually located at the bottom left corner of the main screen. You can now customize them by placing your location, zip code, time, and such other information that will help your widget function in real time.

To integrate dashboard software widgets into your Mac operating system is to enhance the capability of your computer as a whole. Just make sure that you have the minimum software and hardware requirements to run the Dashboard and the widgets and you should be good to go.

If you are interested in Integrate Dashboard Software, check this website to learn more about integrate KPI utility.

How to Use Widgets

People are always looking for ways to advertise online. It helps to keep them competitive and also helps them to generate addition revenue for their business. Now there's an additional way to cash in. It's in the form of widgets.

A widget is a software application that is placed inside webpages. They are distinct because the applications are rather small. They help with newsfeeds and social networking websites. They have become some of the little darlings of social networking.

People thrive on these for additional income and are constantly looking for them to put on their webpages. Advertisers have caught on as to how popular these small applications are. This is good for them because as they are displayed, visitors can be entertained and advertisers can get revenue along with the website owner.

Widgets can be found on social networking websites such as Facebook and Open Social. The visitors are the ones that keep the applications going, despite the fact that they are created by developers.

There are two ways that they can become popular: either by being the application that is used the most or the one that has the best quality. In this aspect, the brand name is irrelevant in the sense that the viral marketing aspect is more important. It's imperative that the word gets out to as many people as possible. This will help or sink the survival of the application.

If you're using these, a good thing about them is that with WordPress, it's not necessary to make alterations to the coding of your theme. You can use a drag-and-drop method which helps to index the blogs easier.

To download the plug-ins from WordPress, there are detailed instructions available to show you how to do it. In the process of setting up your applications, there are some things that you need to remember. These things can help you stand out and be more profitable:

o Use applications that are visitor-friendly.

o Have a strategy for virally marketing the applications.

o Find out how visitors like the applications.

o The key ingredient is to communicate; it doesn't matter how much you advertise, if you're not effective in getting the word out, then it won't work.

Having these strategies in place will help visitors to trust you more and continue to come back to your website more often.

Rebecca Star is a custom web designer consultant and creator. For more information about her custom web design creations, please visit http://www.MegaStarMedia.com