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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