Bloggy Widgets

Do you love sharing your pictures with your family and friends? You might use Flickr or Photobucket’s services so you could have a publicly available album on the ‘Net. Some of you might even have a Flickr badge. Do you think that it’s enough that you share it that way or would you like to have other options? Here’s one for you: a slideshow from Slide.com!

The nifty thing about Slide.com is that you can use the images that you already have on other services like Flickr, Photobucket, even MySpace. (There are other services from which you could get your images.) You simply need to go to slide.com and you will be able to figure out things quite easily. You just go there and select the source of your images. You could even upload the images from your computer. It’s quite easy. Then you click “Done” to save your slideshow. You will be led to a page containing the code that you will copy and paste on your blog’s sidebar.

Things you could customize:
Size of the widget
It could be vertical or horizontal. It could be that you’d set it to be 150×250 pixels. Or maybe even wider if you like.
Style of the widget.
You could have it as in sliding images, one after the other. You could also have it swirling on the space. Or maybe even as some sort of collage, with images being posted on top of each other with each iteration.
Skins
You could set the color too.
Decorations
You could have bubbles or stars. You could even have cute little hearts floating all over the images.

When you go to Slide.com to create your slideshow, you could sign up so that you could edit it later. If you opt to not sign up, your slideshow is of a fixed set of images. That will be it forever. You could probably try getting another slideshow in that case. You could have your travel pictures on your sidebar soon! Or maybe even pictures of your chilld’s birthday party or first day in school.

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Are you a Flickr user? There was a widget for WordPress that allowed sharing of images on your blog’s sidebar. It is a nifty plugin that you could easily configure to your liking on WordPress. This time, let’s take a look at a Flickr profile widget for your blog. (This applies to both WordPress and non-WordPress users, especially those who are thinking of making the switch or have recently switched to WordPress.)

BigHugeLabs has released this widget that we could all use. What you basically have to do is go to the URL where you could get this Flickr Profile Widget. You could either make a widget for your personal account or your group’s account. As long as you could enter the Username, email address or user ID of the person who is in charge, you would be fine.

Show the interesting ones!

Yes, you could do that because it is one of the options. Aside from that, you could also do it randomly. It really depends on you and how you would like others to see yourself. It could be so random that one time you see your travel photos and another time you’d see all those pictures of your children.

Tweak them colors!

You could have whatever colors you would like them to have. After all, your blog is different from my blog and so on. It is as if you are painting your house. Select your blog’s background and text colors. You should easily be able to decide on those things. You basically use your color scheme for consistency’s sake!

Styles

There are three different styles: horizontal, vertical and compact. If you don’t want it to occupy too much space, as if it’s just a button, use the compact one. It would be really cute!

The nice thing about this widget is that you could preview it before getting the code. Then if you’re already set on it, paste it on your blog

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Inspiration is something you would like to have and why not make sure everyone who reads your blog would have a similar experience? Well, worry about that no more because there is a Daily Painters widget for your blog! Great news, huh? Yes! You could actually get it here.
This widget actually works for a lot of blogs, not just WordPress powered blogs so those of you who have non-WordPress using friends could share the joys of having blog widgets with them. You just need to generate the HTML code that you would like to have on your blog.

Configuring the widget
This widget is something that you don’t configure on your WordPress Dashboard. You configure it before you even generate the code for your blog. Select the color for the text and the border, as well as the background color. You might like to choose colors that go well with the overall color scheme of your blog. However, your colors are limited to the following: black, white, gray, aqua, blue, fuschia, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, yellow.

Once you have already selected the colors, you can copy the code generated and paste it on the sidebar.php file of your WordPress theme or look for the sidebar code on your blog template. (Not sure what a blog theme is? You could check out these blog tutorials.)

Good points of this blog widget:

• You get really interesting images, which are different paintings) at random.
• You could use this for any kind of blogging software that allows you to tweak your template.
• It is a simple to use to widget. (Just copy and paste!)

Not-so-good points of this blog widget:

• It uses a table to display it. (If you are biased towards a purely CSS layout, this could be such an eyesore, sticking out of the theme or template code.)
• You are limited to the colors indicated.
• You don’t have much control on how slow or fast the images would change on the widget.

In any case, it is still an interesting blog widget to have. If you love looking at paintings and images to inspire you or maybe soothe you, it is worth looking at. You would just have to weigh out the pros and cons of this blog widget, considering what you’d like on your blog of course.

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Are you a fan of a particular person’s Flickr photostream? Or maybe you are part of a group of Flickr users and you really enjoy looking at your group’s images. Hmmm. You could actually take it one step further if you are able to actually share it with others. How? Through the Flickr widget. This is a widget which is automatically available for WordPress.com users. (Yes, this is the hosted blogging service of WordPress.)

The Flickr widget

You have a Flickr RSS you want to appear on your sidebar? Find out the RSS URL by going to the user’s page and get the RSS2 URL from the lower left bottom part of the page.

You could also just leave that URL field blank so that you could get a random Flickr photo or photos, depending on how many you have set to be displayed.

You could set the number of photos to be displayed. But if you only want one photo at a time, it is also possible.

Give it a title! Be creative. If you have, for example, your photos there, you could say it’s “Photo time with (your name)!” or if you have the photos of your photo group “(group name) photos.” You could make it have a title suitable to your blog theme too.

Photo sharing fun

This is the nice thing with Flickr — you could share photos and what is better is that there are ways that make it possible for you to put them on your blog. You could have themes for your blog sometimes, like if you have a group which has a set of photos that suit your topic, you could probably use the URL of that for your widget.

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