Blog Widgets, Gadgets and Add-ons

The free, popular, and interesting web widgets and gadgets that you can consider adding to your Blog. Widgets are elements that extract the services or content from other sites. Some of these widgets are useful, providing your readers with news, information, and reference tips. Others may be just fun and games which make your Blog a little more interesting and promote interaction among your readers. Because there are so many applications, developers and sites, this article will be split into parts and we shall update them now and then.

Many of the sites offer easy to install HTML or JavaScript codes. All you need to do is to copy the code and place them into your layout. For instance, if you want a widget to appear in your sidebar, login to your Dashboard, go to Template -> Page Elements and click “Add a Page Element” at the sidebar. Select “HTML/JavaScript”. Paste the code generated by the service provider and save. Every time you create a new page element, it appears at the top of all the other elements. If you want it somewhere near the bottom of the sidebar, just left-click that “Page Element”, drag and drop to the place you want. Click “Save” at the top right hand corner of the page to save the new layout.

A note of caution when adding widgets. While you may be tempted to have as many widgets as you can lay your hands on, having too many may clutter the Blog and cause slower page downloads. Also, since many of them work on JavaScripts, readers who configure their Firefox or IE browsers to block scripts may not see these features. For these reasons, we have added only a couple of widgets to let you have an idea, but have not included all the widgets listed in this article. Take your time to pick those that truly complement your Blog contents.

Google Gadgets

Take a look at the directory of widgets at Google Gadgets and you will instantly know what widgets are all about.



Many of the applications are created by different developers and users. There is no registration required at your end. When you have chosen one, click “Add to your webpage” and you will be asked to customize the title, width, height and border of the gadget. If the width of your sidebar is e.g., 150 px, you may want to set the gadget width to something less than that. It is alright to have a larger width, but readers will have to scroll to view the gadget in its entirety. When you are satisfied, click “Get the Code”. Copy the code and paste it into your “Page Element” described above.

Widgetbox

If you think Google Gadgets are great, you would love the directory of web widgets at Widgetbox. They provide ready installation codes for TypePad, WordPress, Blogger, MySpace and most other blogs, sidebars or websites.



Register for a free account. Search for the widgets that you like. Determine the display settings and click “Get Widget”. You can either “Get Widget Code” and paste it into your Blog layout as described above, or let them do it for you by clicking “Add to Blogger”. We prefer the first method.

If you have several widgets, you can also “Make a New Panel” under “My Widgets” and add these widgets into your panel. The advantage is that when you “Install”, you will have one code generated for the panel rather than several codes.

Snipperoo

In a similar fashion, Snipperoo has a directory of widgets that you can use. You can pick several widgets, arrange them into a panel, and the site will generate one code for you to place on your Blog. We think that configuration was much easier previously. With their new interface and a scheme to pay you for putting the widgets in your Blog, we would rather stick with Widgetbox.

In any event, if you want to have a look, register for a free account. Once you are logged in, begin by creating a “New Panel”. To the left, you will see “Get Widgets”. Add the ones you like into your Panel. Drag and drop to arrange them in the desired positions. Click “Publish” to update and generate a code.

AddThis

This is a useful service. The widget allows readers to easily bookmark your Blog, or subscribe to your feeds. It supports many feed reader as well as social bookmarking services. The design looks neat and saves up a lot of space.

Register at their AddThis site. You can either have a Bookmarking widget



or Feed widget



If you are prompted to enter your Feed URL, you could use your Blog URL with “/atom.xml” or “/rss.xml” after it. In this Blog, you will see that the Bookmarking widget has been inserted into the template such that it automatically appears after every post. To do this, go to Template -> Edit HTML and click the “Expand Widget Templates” checkbox.



Next, look for this line: -

<div class='post-footer'>

Paste the generated Bookmarking widget code either just before or just after that. You can preview the Blog to see the difference in the position of the widget. Should you want the widget to appear on the left or right, you can align it by adding the following alignment tags to the widget code:-

<div align='right'>WIDGET CODE</div>

Lilypie

If you have a baby, child, or are expecting one, the tickers you find at Lilypie will be nice inclusions in your Blog.



You don't need to register to use the service. Simply choose the background, select marker and input personalized text to create a ticker code. Paste the HTML code into your Page Element.

TickerFactory

This is another tracker that you can add to your Blog. Visit their TickerFactory site and choose something that you would like to track. The popular ones are weight loss progress, baby's age and anniversary countdowns. No registration is required.



Customize the ruler and ticker slider designs, copy the HTML code and paste it into your Page Element.

AuctionAds



Sign up for an account at AuctionAds to display an eBay auction widget. The displays are related to the key words you assigned. According to their FAQ, their ads are compatible with AdSense and other ad systems. In short, you can have both AuctionAds and AdSense ads in your Blog. You get a commission when someone buys an item from eBay and it is an additional way to earn some revenue through your Blog.

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BLOGGER DIRECTORIES-INCREASE TRAFFIC

How do you attract more readers and visitors to your Blog? To make your Blog more visible, the solution lies in submitting your Blog URL or RSS Feed to as many good Blog directories as possible. There are hundreds of websites touting themselves as blog search engines, blog directory hosts, feed aggregators, and traffic exchanges. A couple of the website creators are out to make a quick buck, selling their sites and member database on eBay the moment they attract sufficient traffic.

Over the past few weeks, I have submitted this Blog and RSS feed to many of these Blog directories for free. The first submissions were of course to Google and Yahoo; if you have not submitted your Blog URL to them, you may read the earlier articles on submitting sitemap to Google and submitting sitemap to Yahoo. At the same time, submit the Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com too.


Although my blog is only about 2 months' old at the time of this writing, if I were to enter my blog title “tips for new bloggers” into Google search, I am able to see it appearing at the top of the search results. Many of the other results are those of the blog directories in which this blog was listed. Listing in directories therefore helps in promoting your blog.

Before you proceed to submit your site to these directories, my personal advice is that you create a free web-based email account solely for this purpose. Should the directory hosts decide to sell their sites and database in future, your present email account would not be compromised. This is also to prevent flooding of your personal email with updates sent to you by the many directory administrators.

The aim of this article is to relate to you my experience in those free blog directories that I have tried submitting to. While I appreciate comments on these, please refrain from posting suggestions of new blog directory sites. A number of them may be fly-by-nights and I will not recommend them unless I have personally used them. Others may have specific requirements such as blogs having to be older than 6 months, or blogs covering specific news contents.

Different directories have different forms to fill when submitting your blog. Their instructions are usually easy to follow. However, you may want to note the following:-

1. Some directories require you to register before adding your Blog. While most of them allow you to submit more than one Blog, some may require you to use a different login name for each Blog. What I did in these situations was to create different login names but using the same email address.

2. If you are asked for the RSS Feed or your Feed URL, check that under your Settings -> Site Feed, the “Allow Blog Feed” shows either “Full” or “Short.” Do not choose “None.” Your Feed URL is yourblogURL/feeds/posts/default or yourblogURL/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss where yourblogURL is the URL of your Blog beginning with http:// Do not type in “www” for Blogger blogs. For example, our Atom Feed URL is http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default You can test it by typing your feed address into a web browser and view. If you have an external Feed address like a Feedburner Feed address, you may submit that too. I shall go into the details of Feed and Feed directories in a separate article.

3. Where you are to create a picture, banner, or link button to represent your blog, you can use Google's Picasa or any image editing software to create a new picture, or resize a current one to the required dimensions. Normally, you are required to upload it onto a free image host or server and provide the URL of your banner or picture. You can read about using free hosts like Google Page Creator and Google Groups. We also have a rather comprehensive list of free Image Hosts and File Hosting Services in our article on Manage Blogger Image Storage Space. Check out those sites and choose one that is fast, reliable and enables hotlinking to the uploaded files.

4. The “Reciprocal Link URL” is the main page where you will be putting a link to their blog directory. More likely than not, this will be the URL of your Blog.

5. The “meta keywords” or “tags” are keywords that represent your blog's content. Similarly “meta description” is a short few sentences describing your blog. Basically, “meta” tags provide information about your Blog for search engines to identify and match.

As the directory list is long, the article will be split into several parts, and updated as and when I try out the sites. Some sites track the number of the visitors to your blog. You may see voting gateways, which basically give visitors a chance to vote for your blog if they wish to. If they do not want to vote, there is always an option for them to enter the site without voting. Have a look at the directory sites and submit your blog to those you like.

Traffic Exchange Sites

A number of traffic exchange sites have blog directories which can include links to your blog.

Blog Directories

Technorati

They supposedly track 75.2 million blogs. Quite naturally, you would want your blog to be one of them. Register with them and submit your blog. Follow their instructions to claim your blog. They will provide you with statistics like the number of blogs that link to you. You can also invite other members to favorite your blog.

Wikablog

If you are familiar with Wikipedia, this is the equivalent for blogs. It faces the same problems as Wikipedia i.e., while it is easy to list your blog, it is equally easy for others to edit your listing. Nevertheless, for a new blogger, this is one of the fastest way to have your blog appear in a directory. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Fuel My Blog

This is an interesting directory. Unlike the usual text-based blog directories, this site goes by images that you create to represent your blog. When your visitors click a link on your site that says Fuel My Blog!, your image will move up the ranks and appear on the front page, making it more visible to directory viewers.

Blogtoplist

A blog directory listing that is sorted by the number of unique visitors to your blog. Your visitors can also cast a Vote to increase your ranking. The scores are reset every week to allow new bloggers like us a chance to be placed among the top.

Topblogsites

Here, you are ranked by unique hits based on the Votes you receive from your visitors. Many of the comments posted on the directory site are spam comments, and if you can disable comments, you might want to do that. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Mybloggingarea

Another directory that ranks you based on the Votes and the number of unique visitors to your site.

Topblogarea

A blog directory that tracks unique visitors. Unlike the earlier ones, visitors do not vote at this directory.

Blogflare

This is a simple, nice blog directory that tracks your unique visitors and pageviews. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Topblogging

Here, you are ranked based on unique visitors. Although there is a count for votes in, somehow the code provided by them did not track this vote count.

Blogroll

I joined this directory only about a week ago. A simple directory that monitors the Votes and unique hits.

Worldtopblogs

Ranking is by the Votes cast by the visitors to your blog.

Topbloglists

There is a voting gateway for your visitors but ranking is based on unique pageviews.


For more visibility, you may want to submit your Blog to Feed Directories and ping your Blog every time your contents are updated. Also, submit your Blog to the various Search Engines for maximum exposure.

While you are looking at blog directories, you may also want to consider earning money while you are surfing the net. AGLOCO seems to have a nice scheme for you which you may want to take a look. You may also want to consider having AuctionAds to display an eBay auction widget which is compatible with AdSense and other ad systems. No harm trying it since it might give you an extra income.

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Feedburner - FeedCount Chicklet Text

Feedburner is a very popular feed aggregator and provides a host of services which you can tap on to publicize and promote your Blog. One widely used service is their FeedCount Chicklet which displays your Blog Feed's circulation statistics. The chicklet can be static (displaying the number of “readers”) or animated (showing the number of “readers” via feed). Although you can change the background and text color for the graphic display, there is no option for you to change the text. This hack will explain how to change and personalize the FeedCount Chicklet text as well as to change the animation settings so that it rolls the text more than once.

For those who have yet to sign up for a Feedburner account, consider doing so right away. Now that it is under the Google family, there is an easy way for you to channel all your Blogger feed subscribers to Feedburner. Login to Blogger, and under Settings -> Site Feed, enter your Blog's Feedburner Feed address into the box beside “Post Feed Redirect URL.” Readers who click the “Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)” link or the RSS icon in their browsers will be redirected to your Feedburner Feed.

FeedCount Chicklet

When you are logged into Feedburner account and are viewing your Feed details, click the Publicize -> FeedCount tab. This is where you can generate a code to display a chicklet in your Blog which shows the subscriber count. Whether or not you already have a high number of subscribers doesn't really matter. A nice chicklet can draw readers' attention and make it easy for them to click the Feed link.

Choose the custom colors of the body and text and click “Activate”. You will be given a HTML code for the Chicklet. We have to edit this code. Open MS Notepad (usually found under All Programs -> Accessories in Microsoft Windows) or a word processor program. Copy and paste this code.

Static FeedCount HTML Code

The static FeedCount code will look something like this:-

<p><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ TipsForNewBloggers"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/ TipsForNewBloggers?bg=99CCFF&amp;fg=444444& anim=0" height="26" width="88" style="border:0" alt="" /></a></p>

This is the standard FeedCount chicklet you see:-



To change the word “readers” to some other text such as “Viewers”, insert this other code (shown in red). You can change the word “Viewers” to other text, but because of the space constraint, keep it to no more than 7 characters.

<p><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ TipsForNewBloggers"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/ TipsForNewBloggers?bg=99CCFF&amp;fg=444444& anim=0&amp;label=Viewers" height="26" width="88" style="border:0" alt="" /></a></p>

The FeedCount chicklet now looks like this:-



You can change the text to capital letters or include characters, e.g., “*FANS*”, and your new FeedCount Chicklet will look like this:-



Animated FeedCount HTML Code

The animated FeedCount code is rather similar except that the animation value is set as “1” instead of “0”.

<p><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ TipsForNewBloggers"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/ TipsForNewBloggers?bg=99CCFF&amp;fg=444444& anim=1" height="26" width="88" style="border:0" alt="" /></a></p>

When the page is loaded, viewers will see a one-time rolling text of number of “readers” via feed.



The word “readers” can be changed to other text like “Members” by inserting the code (shown in red):-

<p><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ TipsForNewBloggers"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/ TipsForNewBloggers?bg=99CCFF&amp;fg=444444& anim=1&amp;label=Members" height="26" width="88" style="border:0" alt="" /></a></p>

This is the new FeedCount Chicklet you will see. Insert the relevant text that suits your Blog.



Animation to play more than once

Other than the change in text, you can also set the animation to play more than once by changing the anim value to something greater than 1. Since readers are unlikely to stay on a page for too long, it need not be too big a value. When the page is refreshed, the animation count will start all over again.

<p><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ TipsForNewBloggers"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/ TipsForNewBloggers?bg=99CCFF&amp;fg=444444& anim=50&amp;label=Friends" height="26" width="88" style="border:0" alt="" /></a></p>

Our animated FeedCount Chicklet will now look like this:-

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Useful Widgets,Add-Ons & Tools for Your Blog,Website

Outbrain Star Ratings Widget: Very eager to know what your readers think about your posts?
Here is a cool star rating widget by Outbrain. The insttallation is very simple,
just follow the step by step instructions on their site.

ShareThis or AddThis : Sharethis or Addthis social bookmarking buttons makes it easy for your visitors to share your content with others. It is a good way to increase your link popularity and publicity. Their nice css dropdown icons reduces the clutter on your pages and eliminates the need to add a different button for each social bookmarking service.

whos.amung.us : This is a real time visitor tracking widget and displays
the number of people currently on your site and what pages they are
reading. You don't need any sign-up's to grab this widget.


Web2PDF Online : With this widget installed, your visitors can easily download
your articles in PDF format with just a click. The downloaded PDF's are
free of any advertising and you can get full access to download stats,etc.


ZOHO Creator: With Zoho Creator, you can create professional online
contact forms/web forums in minutes. The good things about this is
there are no data limits and readers can also upload attachments while
submitting the form.


Google Talk Badge: Google Talk Badge will let your visitors to
chat with you.The badge will active whenever you sign in to
Googletalk. The nice thing is your visitors can chat with you even
if they don't have a google account.


Yahoo Media Player: With this very useful widget, you caneasily add a simple media player to your blog which can auto detect mp3 links and create an embedded player. This tool is very useful for especially audio,music blogs.



Cbox: Cbox or Chatbox is a chat widget which can be easily embedded
in any web page. It is free and have many features including message
history, spam blocking,etc. It can be easily customizable to fit your
blog layout.


Google Translate: This widget lets your non-English speaking
visitors to quickly translate your webpage in their native
language with just a single click.

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Blogger Statistics Widget

Blogger Statistics Widget for Blogger will display the total number of posts and total number of comments on your blog.

please follow the instructions below.

Instructions to install Statistics Widget for Blogger

1. Log in to your Blogger account

2. On your Blogger Dashboard, click on the "Layout" link

3. This will take you to the "Page Elements" tab. Decide where you want to insert the statistics widget and click on the "Add a Gadget" link accordingly.

4. Scroll down the list and find "HTML/ Javascript" and click on the "+" button

5. This will open the "Configure HTML/ Javascript" window. In the title section, please type "Blog Statistics" or "Blog Information" or "Blog Data" or any other title as you may wish

6. In the content section, please copy & paste the following code:



<div class="codeview">
&lt;script style="text/javascript"&gt;

function numberOfPosts(json) {
document.write('Total Posts: &lt;b&gt;' + json.feed.openSearch$totalResults.$t + '&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;');
}

function numberOfComments(json) {
document.write('Total Comments: &lt;b&gt;' + json.feed.openSearch$totalResults.$t + '&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;');
}

&lt;/script&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;script src="http://techtasks.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=json-in-script&amp;callback=numberOfPosts"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;&lt;/li&gt;

&lt;li&gt;&lt;script src="http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=json-in-script&amp;callback=numberOfComments"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;
</div>



7. Remember to replace the text in bold "yourblog" with your blog address and [ with < . There are two locations you need to replace.<div>
<div> 8. After then click save and you are done. </div><div>
</div><div>Credit : <a href="http://assessmyblog.blogspot.com/" target="_blanck">Assess Myblog</a>


</div></div>


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