Best of the Blog Widgets
Inspired by yesterday’s New York Times article “Some Bling for Your Blog”, I put together a list of my favorite blog widgets:
- Swicki “Hot Searches” Buzzcloud (from Eurekster)
- Recent Readers (from MyBlogLog)
- Flash Photo Stream (from Flickr)
- Preview Anywhere (from Snap)
- “What Am I Doing” Twitter Badge (from Twitter)
- Film Loops (from FilmLoop)
- Number of Readers FeedCount (from Feedburner)
- “I’m online” Skype buttons (from Skype)
- del.icio.us Tagometer (from del.icio.us)
- del.icio.us Linkrolls (from del.icio.us)
- del.icio.us Network Badge (from del.icio.us)
- Timelines (from MyTimelines)
- Link Count (from Technorati)
- Polls (from PollDaddy)
- Now Playing (from SIGamp)
- BuzzBoost (from Feedburner)
- Books in my Library (from LibraryThing)
and these which are not really widgets, but plugins (for WordPress):
- Ultimate Tag Warrior (tag clouds)
- Share This (add to social bookmarking services)
- Recent Comments (recent comments in the sidebar)
Many more widgets listed in the Widgetoko and Widgetbox directories.
Just remember when “blinging” out your blog, not to overdue it. Think critically about the value to your reader of each badge / widget that you add, because it adds download time to your pages, which detracts from the user experience.
Any important blog bling that I missed?
Have you tried The Good blogs widget and google reader widgets ? Both display posts from other blogs. Google reader allows you share the feeds your read.
Interesting thing I noticed on your blog is my comment contains my profile from mybloglog.. How is that being done ? As far as I now mybloglog gives recent readers, outgoing links and analytics. This is new !
Hi Nbhat. That is new. I just installed the MyAvatars plugin for WordPress. Pretty cool, eh!