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Acme Company Not the Only Place To Get Widgets

There are innumerable ways to add content to a website. One way is the use of widgets. What is a widget? How do you use them? Where can you use them? These are questions that led to endless hours researching on the internet.

What is A Widget?

Widgets can be defined in a variety of ways describing what function they perform, whether they are on your desktop or online, and the components involved in widgets.

Some definitions are as follows:

Widget Engine
In computer software, a widget engine is a host software system for running and displaying desktop widgets on the desktop. Desktop widgets are physically inspired applets that give access to information and frequently used functions such as clocks, calendars, news aggregators, etc.

The widget model is attractive because of ease of development. Most widgets can be created with a few images and about 10 to several hundred lines of XML /JavaScript /VBScript.

GUI Widget
In computer programming, a widget (or control) is an interface element that a computer user interacts with, such as a window or a text box. Widgets are sometimes qualified as virtual to distinguish them from their physical counterparts. For example, virtual buttons that can be clicked with a mouse versus physical buttons that can be pressed with a finger. Widgets are often packaged together in widget toolkits. Programmers use widgets to build graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

Web Widget
The web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are derived from the idea of reusable code that has existed for years. Other terms used to describe web widgets including: gadget, badge, module, capsule, snippet, mini and flake. Web widgets often but not always use DHTML, JavaScript or Adobe Flash.

Mobile Widget
The mobile widget is essentially the same thing as the GUI widget, but it is designed for use on mobile devices.

Where Can You Find Widgets?

So now that you have an idea of what a widget is and what you can do with it, where do get them? I try to limit my resources for such things to as few as possible. With so much on the internet in regards to things like this one can get bogged down with info quite quickly. So here are some resources for widgets:

1. Springwidgets.com
2. Widgetbox.com
3. Oneqube.com

Below you will see some examples of widgets and what content they can provide. The first is a widget that holds multiple RSS feeds that I use on my desktop.

The next example demonstrates that you can get almost anything in a widget, even video games:

There are widgets for nearly anything you can think of. If you can’t find a widget for what you want, the sources listed above have resources for creating your own. They can be placed nearly anywhere too. There are widgets specifically designed for use with sites such as MySpace, MyYearbook, Facebook and also, desktops for PC and Mac. So whatever your needs are for content, widgets may be the answer.