Widgets (aka Gadgets) are now found everywhere on the web - people use them for cross promoting their blogs, running picture slide-shows in the sidebar, sharing favorite music or video clips, displaying Amazon Shopping wish-list and more.
Two of my favorite blog widget providers are YourMinis and Widgetbox - both offer detailed stats and an option to embed widgets in your Blogger, MySpace, FaceBook, Netvibes, Google IG, PageFlakes or other accounts automatically.
Let's look at them more closely:
WidgetBox Blidget - Type in your blog address and you instantly get a blog widget in wide or long skyscraper formats. They have some extremely nice color gradients, the font styles are very appealing and you can display just the article headline or even full posts inside the widget.
There's neither an option to resize the widget nor can you configure the colors according to your site design.
YourMinis RSS Widget - If you think normal is boring, you'll love YourMinis. They give you a Flash based design environment to help you create a widget from any RSS feed.
The YourMinis widgets are resizable (drag the corner handles) and you get to select font families, font sizes and background color schemes for your widget.
Visitors can read the first few lines of your blog post by hovering the mouse over the title itself - there's an optional inline browser to help visitors read full posts without leaving the webpage that they are currently viewing.
While both services offer the option to publish your widget to any blogging platform or social media website, YouMinis widgets can run in the Vista sidebar like other native Vista gadgets.
Alternatively, you can place the web widgets on you desktop if you have Adobe Apollo runtime installed - create once, publish anywhere. Watch both YourMinis blog widget and WidgetBox Blidget live in action at myspace.com/labnol