Social Media Innovation

Posts Tagged ‘Flickr’

A widget created for a study in an architecture class.

Photo credit: Widget by JaredVanderzell

After looking at all the options that were available to me for widgets, I decided on 7 that I thought would really benefit my blog, while not causing over crowding. Those that made the cut were Pages, Recent Posts, Tag Cloud, Websites, Flickr Photos, Archives and Sitemeter. Below, I’ll describe why I decided on these particular ones.

Pages

I not only picked the Pages widget, but also decided to have it be the first widget on the right-hand sidebar. This widget lists pages that I create in an easily found location on the top-right of my blog. Pages are, in a sense, more permanent blog posts, or content that people may want to reference more often than the casual blog post. This facilitates the need for quickly finding that information.

Recent Posts

I chose Recent Posts as the next item so that wherever the reader is browsing in my blog, they can easily access the most recent information that I have posted.

Tag Cloud

As I write more and more posts, tagging each as I go, I am interested in what I spent most of my time writing about. The Tag Cloud with show that, as posts that share the same tag will display that tag larger in the cloud than the others. This also provides a way for readers to click on a tag to bring up all posts that share that tag.

Websites

Websites are displayed next, which redirect readers to different websites that I use and hold accounts for. This allows them to see some of my other work and get a better idea of who I am.

Flickr Photos

This was by far the most difficult widget. It involved a lot of customization and coding. I wanted a way to display some of the photos that I have taken over the years in the sidebar as a widget. Flickr has enabled a way for its members to create badges that display their photos that can be posted anywhere on the internet. So, I used the Text widget to paste their code into, and then proceeded to heavily modify it to fit this blog’s layout and theme. Overall, I am very pleased with the result.

Archives

In addition to Pages and the Tag Cloud, I wanted to have a way for readers to view older posts without having to page through every single one to get to the one they want. Archives enabled me to do just that in a very elegant manner.

Sitemeter

I use Sitemeter to track visits to my blog. In order to enable that, I had to use another Text widget to paste in the code generated by the Sitemeter website. This allows me to keep track of how often my blog is being read.

These widgets have worked great for me so far. Do you use any widgets on your blog? Let me know what you use in the comments below.