March 30, 2006

Wordpress and TypePad add ‘widgets’ blogs and podcasting — by TDavid @ 10:53 am PST New! (Hmm, no ratings yet)  Loading ...

Before you think of widgets in the sense of Konfabulator, er I mean Y! Widgets, Mac Dashboard Widgets, Microsoft Gadgets, etc., Wordpress and TypePad have decided to make it easier for their users to insert third party content into the sidebar. Matt explains:

The widgets are basic right now, things like search, categories, pages, etc, but we’re going to be adding more based on your requests and we’re opening up an API for anyone to create their own widgets. (It’s as writing a single function and wrapping it in a WordPress plugin.)

TypePad parries by offering their own Widget Directory and also opens up the API (right on!) so third party developers (or users) can roll their own widgets. TechCrunch has already tried it out:

I tried the feature (you can see an example of integration of Sphere blog search on my Typepad Blog ) and it works quite well, you can easily relocate or remove widgets, and I believe it will save me some time from now on.

Two solid announcements for bloggers of either (or both) platforms.

I do wonder if using the word “widget” though is ill-advised, but what else could they have called them? Sidebarlets? Bloglets?

4 Comments »

1. Riding the current wave of extensibility. BTW, TDavid, what do you use for your blog? Did you roll your own? If so, what language?

   Comment by Sterling Camden — March 30, 2006 @ 2:10 pm PST

2. I’m using a minor custom modded version of Wordpress here, but use several other blog clients elsewhere, including a very simple one I rolled myself.

   Comment by TDavid — March 30, 2006 @ 2:32 pm PST

3. Thanks for the info — I’m considering moving to something else for my blog. I’ve been using Marko’s muBlog (PHP script), but it doesn’t do a lot of things. I could add the features myself, but it would take some time. Thought about rewriting in Ruby on Rails just for the fun of it. Seems like Wordpress is pretty popular, and judging from the sites it has a lot of features. Might go that way.

   Comment by Sterling Camden — March 30, 2006 @ 2:45 pm PST

4. […] Currently, I use zero widgets on my production machine, two widgets on my Tablet PC (Yahoo! Widgets), and four Dashboard Widgets on my Mac. There are widgets available for Wordpress and Typepad but I haven’t spent much time checking to see what’s useful there. […]

   Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Searching for useful widgets — September 12, 2006 @ 9:32 am PST

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