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Widgets Archives

December 3, 2007

Widgetising Flightglobal

An integral part of the evolving Flightglobal is the introduction of widgets into the make up of our pages.

Widgets have their origins in blogs and other Web 2.0 services, but the use of them is becoming more widespread as sites recognise their potential and re-architecture to best accommodation their presence.

We’ve been making limited use of widgets for some time on our blogs – for example, the Woracle has a bunch of widgets in the right-hand column doing various things such as:

1) Navigation by date
2) A list of other relevant blogs (Blogroll),and
3) A graphical depiction of free-form tags (Tag Cloud)

We also make use of a Highest Rated Article widget displayed against Flightglobal articles.

However, we’re ramping up our use of widgets all over the site as they have some real benefits from an editor’s perspective.

1) They help keep pages really dynamic, updating in real time
2) They allow targeted content to be pulled together to form pages of rich, diverse content
3) They allow us to pull available third-party into Flightglobal pages, improving the user experience and the breadth of coverage

You can see a few examples of widgets starting to be used throughout the main area of the website. For example: on the Defence section home page we’ve got widgets on:

• Latest news
• Question of the week
• Related jobs
• Related blogs
• Latest posts from the DEW Line
• Eurofighter news
• Latest military discussion on AirSpace

We’ve plan to role this practice out to other section home pages very soon.

Additionally, Flightglobal is developing external-facing widgets.

By this I mean widgets for use by external parties on their sites.

This page showcases the kind of widget that other sites could use and tells you who to contact if you’re interested in having one on your site.

January 4, 2008

Further reading on widgets

Seeing as widgets are set to be such an important topic for Flightglobal, thought it might be useful to pull together a list of various types of widgets and some further reading ...

Recommended widgets

http://widgets.yahoo.com/search/top-rated
http://mashable.com/2007/09/06/widgets-2/

News widgets

http://eco.netvibes.com/widgets/live?category=4

http://widgets.yahoo.com/search/?q=news

Images widgets

http://bumped.org/WebApps/category/image-widgets/
http://flickrtools.blinklist.com/tag/flickr%20widgets/

Video widgets

http://newteevee.com/2007/10/16/top-five-video-widgets-to-fidget-with/

Apple widgets

http://www.applematters.com/index.php/section/comments/the-9-best-widgets/

Community widgets

http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/363435/top-ten-facebook-widgets.html
http://www.boonex.com/products/ray/
http://www.rateitall.com/t-22486-community-widgets.aspx

Blog widgets

http://widgets-gadgets.com/2007/08/top-10-web-widgets-for-your-blog.html
http://technorati.com/widgets/blogwidgets

RSS widgets

http://widgets.yahoo.com/search/?q=RSS

Map widgets

http://www.visitwidget.com/feature.htm (good one for community build by nation)
http://bumped.org/WebApps/category/map-widgets/

Creating your own widget

http://www.yourminis.com/
http://grazr.com/config.html

Further widget reading:

Widget marketplaces (see WidgetBox, LabPixies and Wigipedia),

Widget blogs (see WidgetsLab and Widgetoko).

Widget conference (whole conference)

About Widgets

This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Flightglobal in the Widgets category. They are listed from oldest to newest.

Week on the Web is the previous category.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.