Building Widgets?

Is it something anyone can do?

[Reno]

Has anyone started using Widgets to drive more traffic to their website? For those of us who are not advanced coding wonks, are there any relatively easy-to-use programs that would help in Widget creation?

Google and Yahoo and lots of other mega sites are using them, so I'm wondering if it's something the small guys can tackle.

I've seen references to Konfabulator and I've briefly explored some of the online Widget building services, but am so new to the concept that any advice from a seasoned pro would be appreciated. Thanks...

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[jezra]

I am in no way a seasoned pro. However, I have built two widgets; one for Konfabulator and the other for Dashboard. Both widgets are basic data aggregaters that display information about recent uploads to a CMS.

Dashboards Widgets are created using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. There are a few custom JavaScript functions that need to interact with the OS, but for the most part the JavaScript is fairly basic.

Konfabulator Widgets are created using XML to describe the interface and JavaScript to make it run.

When I coded my widgets, I found the Konfabulator widget easier to create due to the extensive documentation. Not to say that there wasn't documentation for Dashboard widgets at the time. It's just that Apples documentation isn't written in a way that is easy for me to understand.

In general, a basic widget can be coded in an afternoon with some coffee and familiarity with JavaScript.

But does it drive traffic to my site? In my case, I would actually say no, but it is a nice feature to offer those who would like to use it. To check the usefulness of the widgets, I have appended all links to my site in the widgets with either "&konf" or "&dash" so a quick glance of my weblogs will show me how may people are using the widgets.

[Lokutus]

Widgets are so 2005, man.

[Reno]

Thanks jezra for your informative answer -- much appreciated. I may play with the widget idea as time allows, and given that you don't see any significant traffic boost, I won't go into it expecting miracles. But it might be fun, and that's reason enough.

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