Content Management Matters ™

In this guide we show you how anyone can build and embed simple web widgets.

It's free, extremely easy and takes about five minutes to roll out your first creation. One of the best things about widgets is that you can enable sharing. Sharing widgets means more mashing of your ideas and content. More mashing means more community and more buzz around your brainchildren. For those who love to play and live in the WWW sandbox, this article is for you.

There are a number of ways to get targeted news, relevant to your niche, to your website. We've tried most of them, and the new NewsBar Wizard from Google News AJAX Search API is easily the best to date.

Simply enter the keywords you want to show up in the feed, copy the code generated by Google, and embed it to your website. The result enables visitors to view the latest headlines from each of the listed terms at a glance, and click quickly between news for the various search terms. The widget displays the results without any heavy-handed branding, flashy effects, or unnecessary load times. In short, it's Google doing what it does best -- giving us unparalled results faster than anyone else.

We show you exactly how to embed this fantastic new capability onto a WordPress -driven website, but the principle will be largely the same for most other content management and blogging platforms (if you use static html, it'll be easier again). It's a CPP situation (copy javascript, paste, pray...). You know the kind.

Here's where to get the Google NewsBar Wizard.

And here's the full lowdown, with embedding directions:

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.

Today the widget-Wonkas over at JS-Kit debuted Navigator, a web service that "distills" community opinion and user behavior (TWO DIFFERENT THINGS!) into a set of moderate-able and actionable site content views.

This yields two separate benefits:

• Site managers can alter the service's look and feel based on two different forms of data (what users say they want, and what they actually do)
• Regular visitors get quick access to content attuned to their personal preferences (whether they know it or not)

Everybody's getting into the multi-platform apps game (including Google, whose Maka-Maka may make mince meat of Facebook's piddly open apps party). Even Apple's opening to third-party apps for its iPhone offering.

Meebo is a hosted service that actually joins platforms instead of spreading seeds onto them. And frankly, it's past due for a little disruption.

Following closely in the footsteps of Movable Type 4, which likes to think of itself as less of a blog platform than a harmonious collective of plugins, New Zealand-based Silverstripe has released a blog module with a "drag n' drop widget system."

Why use one word when five will do?

Toward its working goal of releasing a set of standards for widget development, the W3C has just released an updated draft of "Widgets 1.0 Requirements."

WordPressers, "Getz" over to wordpress.com and prepare to update your favorite blogging engine.

The latest is a big release. On top of many improvements -- most notably the inclusion of widgets -- version 2.2 counts over 240 bug fixes.