Saturday, March 18th, 2006

Widgets! Widgets! Widgets!

I’ve substantially upgraded LibraryThing’s widgets, the little things you stick on your blog or web page to tell people what your reading (and more). The major improvements are:

  • Tag and author cloud widgets! Show your tags or the authors in your collection, either by frequency or randomly. Control the type size, size “contrast,” number, style, etc.
  • Cover-only widgets, with fixed width and height options for better display
  • Preset widgets for ease of use, customized widgets for every need, and you can still muck around with customizing them yourself with CSS*
  • Control over showing title or title and author, where links go, etc.
  • AllConsuming-like widgets
  • CSS now includes LTodd and LTeven styles, so you can add striping if you want
  • Super Ajaxorific look and feel; you’ll see more of this around LibraryThing

I hope you have as much fun with them as I had making them. I’d love to hear what you think of them, and what you want. Improvments I’m working on:

  • Sorting by the data-read, date-bought fields
  • Connections widgets. Do you want them?

*Julie Meloni’s blog post Styling the LibraryThing blog widget remains the best discussion of how to hyper-customize widgets with CSS. The only real change is on odd/even striping; tags don’t add much.

UPDATE: Show us how you use your widget and if you’ve modified it in a cool way by posting the URL in the comments!

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One Comments:

  1. Janeen says:

    I’d love to see some non-script widgets for wordpress, especially one with covers…

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