Another way to spread the word about DG

Dave, have you ever seen this site: http://www.widgetbox.com/

It offers free "widgets" for people to plug into their blogs. I don't know if it costs money to have them offer your widget or not, but it might be a way to further publicize your site, if you are so inclined.

They have lots of other sites offering blidgets and widgets on there and most of them aren't nearly as useful or interesting as DG. I'd love to be able to put a DG widget on my blog!

Do you have any buttons or anything designed up for such a thing?

I've thought about this before. But, what kinds of widgets could we make? I know we could make a "Bloom of the Day" widget using our bloom.com database, and we could also make a "Gardening Article of the Day" feature once our gardening articles really get going, but other than that I'm not really coming up with much.

dave

Well, I think either of those would be awesome. A lot of the widgets I was looking at were sort of like mini-blogs, with headlines that linked to posts on their site. But they weren't very visually appealing.

You could do a rotating picture (hourly, daily, something) - that would be very appealing to visually motivated bloggers like me. Other ideas - unusual plants, fun-fact of the day, gardening trivia, articles. Aren't there some gardening book reviews on the site? Something like that could work, too. Even perhaps a "today's most active forum topics" thing or similar.

Ooh! Another idea - "Today's Trades" for seed or plant trading.

Video links to your video section.

Good ideas! I'll see what I can do. :)

dave

Did I do it correctly?

http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/dgpotd

dave

Yep! It works like a charm. See it in action on my blog, here: http://www.digigirl.us

Don't look at the rest of the blog, I'm still building it.

I think it looks great! What does one do with a widget?

Okay, I think I get it now that I looked at digigirl's blog. :)

Couple of quick suggestions - I would make the title just a little bit smaller and maybe centered, make the picture just a little bit bigger, and then make the details below yet smaller. Make the pic the star - that's what will draw people's eyes and make them click on it to go to DG!

Good calls. I increased the photo size from 100px to 140px and lowered the size of the title. What do you think of it?

dave

Perfect!

Cool - thanks! :)

Interesting observation - when I look at my blog in Firefox, the box is transparent - in other words, just the title, picture and words appear, looking like it's actually part of my sidebar. In Internet Explorer 6.0, it looks like a white box with the title, picture and words on top of it.

Which way did you intend it to be?

Actually, neither. :) I just put the picture words and linked into a HTML box and syndicated it to widgetbox. If the look is changing, I wonder if widgetbox changes it??

dave

I expect it's just how the different browsers are interpreting what you put in there. If you didn't specify a background, then I'd say that Firefox interprets whatever the widgetbox base is as "transparent" and IE interprets it as "white."

Both look fine, in my opinion - just thought you should know in case you were aiming for a particular look.

Digigirl, when I go to your blog, I don't see Dave's widget at all. Do you see it on mine? (Thanks for the reminder, BTW, I haven't updated mine all year!). http://breezedale.blogspot.com/

Kathleen, I see it on yours. I don't see it on digigirl's anymore, it was there a couple days ago but she probably changed things since I don't see it there anymore.

That explains it, Liz! Thanks.

Kaperc, yep it shows up perfectly on yours. It doesn't show on mine right now because I was playing with different themes, but it'll be on there in the final version.

I have widgets on my blogs now too. Love 'em! Thanks!

http://www.heavenscentbynancy.blogspot.com/
http://heavenscentbynancy2.blogspot.com/

Beautiful photographs and garden, Nancy!

Well, I am now widgeted on my blog. I was surprised at how easy it was to install. Very nicely done.

Thank you, Kaperc! Glad you visited!

Nap....I LOVE your flowers!! Makes me want to go out and talk turkey to my measly offerings!! Jo

Thank you, Jo! What a great thing to say! Very glad you like them.