Widgetboxer Erika Campos of San Francisco has been using Widgetbox to help her plan her annual Thanksgiving dinner for the past two years. We asked her to give us the details of some of the widgets she’s using this year to help her plan the big day.

• The first thing I did this year was to install a Thanksgiving countdown widget. It took less than five minutes to install the widget on my blog and social media profiles. Every time I check my pages it’s there to keep me organized and focused.
• Next I installed the party planning widget. It’s definitely a must for any type of party or event planning. There’s a direct link to Evite.com to help with email invitations, up to the minute weather forecasts, and party planning tips.
• Every year I try to introduce a new recipe or two, so the recipe widgets are great for giving me new ideas to try. My favorites are the Epicurious and Chow.com widgets. They give me recipes from Gourmet, Bon Appetit, and other renowned food magazines. This year the new recipes I’m trying are: Cider Glazed Turkey, Brown Butternut Squash Couscous, and Spiced Apple Cupcakes.
• Finally on the day of Thanksgiving I like to send all my family and friends Thanksgiving postcards—especially those who won’t be able to make it to dinner—just to let them know that I have been thinking about them

Need even more Thanksgiving planning ideas and widgets? Go to Widgetbox.com.

Widgetbox has a variety of interactive widgets that can help students learn math, science, history, and grammar skills. From kindergarten to high school, there are a wide range of widgets that help students of all levels with various subjects.

Parents and teachers have found our educational widgets to be a fun and simple way to teach students while keeping them engaged.

Some of our most popular educational widgets include:

• Maths-Whizz Scientific Calculator
• Periodic Table of the Elements
• Grammar Girl Quiz
• Bill of Rights

See how one high school teacher is using Widgetbox to teach her students »

The Gallery app will allow you to showcase your brand’s news or products, while highlighting one featured item. Your followers will be able to click on each individual article or product summary—driving traffic back to your website.

The Poll app will allow you to create customized polls for your Facebook Fan Page. Poll your followers on new releases, hot article topics, or just about anything else. With our real-time updating, you’ll be able to view up-to-the–minute results of your poll anytime you want.

Like all of our Facebook Fan Page apps—the Gallery and Poll apps allow you to include; a customized header with an image, font colors of your choosing, and a sidebar widget.

Facebook Fan Page apps are only available to our Publisher Pro and Business Pro users.

If you’re not currently a Publisher Pro or Business Pro user , you can go Pro for free and start using Pro features such as our customizable Facebook Fan Page apps.

With no coding knowledge necessary you can easily make a multiple choice questionnaire to put on your blog, a “Contact Us” form for your website, or a fun party invitation to share with friends on MySpace.

You can choose from 8 basic themes and include up to 5 fields in your Form widget. Best of all you can easily download your form submissions results right from Widgetbox.

Pro users get even more customization options and features for their widget. In addition to choosing from 16 themes, Pro users can; add unlimited fields, upload their own header image, and even hide the Get Widget button.

Not a Pro user? Go Pro for free with our new 7-day trial and start adding Pro features to your widgets.

To fulfill my mission — putting social media to work to make Smarter Planet real and relevant to people around the world — I’ve found Widgetbox to be the kind of smarter service that has helped me syndicate content from the Smarter Planet | Tumblr site much farther and wider than I ever imagined. The widgets I was able to build from the feeds of topic-specific content have helped us more than double our reach in just a few months.

What’s more, with minimal technical expertise I was able to easily customize the design and functionality of each widget — Smarter Cities, Smarter Energy, Smarter Healthcare (as well as the Analytics Album which cover this new frontier of advanced business analytics, a very hot area) — and even succeeded in translating them into Facebook Apps.

Smarter Planet is about the great leap ahead as the digital and physical worlds mesh and converge. About an Internet of trillions of connected devices, tags and even software objects like the staggering array served up by Widgetbox. In the end its about all the ways in which we all become smarter as knowledge flows.

I hope you’ll share the Smarter Planet story by sharing these widgets with your networks. And thanks Widgetbox for making my job smarter, easier and more effective.

Jack Mason
Strategic Programs & Social Media
IBM Global Business Services
Twitter IDs: ibmbizanalytics, jackmason

The Countdown Pro Creator enables users to easily, without any coding, create custom countdown widgets that can be shared across the web and shared on Facebook. Creating your countdown is easy and there are several opportunities to personalize the widget (a full tutorial is coming shortly!):

- Set your widget’s size: width and height
- Create your event: what are you counting down to?
- When is the date: set the date using our calendar
- Add a theme or custom background: you can upload your own photo or choose any of our available themes (birthdays, weddings, etc)
- Customize the clock: choose the look (flip, analog or digital) and position it
- Add a link to your website: great for driving traffic to your site, blog or brand!
- Add a finale: provide a message when the countdown concludes

Get started now: Build your own Countdowns!

Here are several examples – all created in just a couple minutes. Building the countdowns is as easy as it is fun. Please share your countdowns in the below comments and we will feature some of our favorites in the coming days.

Twilight: New Moon Countdown

Left 4 Dead 2 Countdown

Christmas Countdown

The Skygreen Leopards Album Release Countdown

My Wedding Countdown

NASA STS-127 Countdown

The first step is connecting your Widgetbox account with Facebook (read why and how).

Once your Widgetbox account is connected with Facebook, sharing and promoting is simple and effective. There are two primary options:

Share Through the Get Widget Menu

Whether you created the widget or you just grabbed and embedded it, sharing the widget on Facebook is a powerful way to tell friends (either about the widget itself or where you have placed it!). Once you grab the code via the Get Widget menu, you will now see a link to “Share on Facebook”:

By clicking the Share button, you will be prompted with a Facebook Connect window that includes the widget name, description, logo and link. Before publishing, you will also be allowed to write an additional caption for your Facebook Feed. You can choose not to write additional content and simply press Publish – or, you can also choose to write something additional and it will be included in your Facebook post (but not on Widgetbox):

When published, it will appear in your Facebook feed and be available to your friends (and their friends!)… opening it to thousands of additional viewers and subscribers.

Use Facebook Share

Another method of posting on Facebook is to use the the new “Share on Facebook” button that is now available on every widget details page (directly beneath the widget). Using the Share button does not require users to use Facebook Connect.

Once clicked, you will receive a Facebook window allows you to either ‘Post to Profile’ (in other words the Facebook Feed) or ‘Send a Message’ directly to your Facebook friends (via Facebook mail). In either option, you will be able to include an additional message or publish directly:

If you have chosen to share via the feed it will look similar to the below:
- my message
- the widget icon / logo
- the widget name and details
- the ability for friends to comment, like and share

Excitingly, if the widget is flash-compatible, you will notice a blue play button. When clicked, the widget that expands ands plays directly in the Facebook feed!

Exciting news: you can now create Blidgets and Blidget Pros from your Facebook Feed. Add you Twitter activity, blog or RSS feed, and other useful content from across the web and you have the ultimate social media / marketing widget! Here’s how:

1. Install Chia’s Newsfeed RSS App

To get started, you need to allow the new Newsfeed RSS Application on Facebook and grant it access. The application will access your Facebook feed and convert it into an RSS feed. Note: this all occurs on Facebook.com and you will need to login before accessing the application and granting access

You can read more about Newsfeed RSS on ReadWriteWeb.

2. Grab the RSS Feed and Create Your Blidget Pro!

Once you have granted Newsfeed RSS access, you will be provided a link to your feed. You can now enter that directly into the Widgetbox Blidget Pro editor (enter directly from our homepage). You will now have the regular options to:

- customize the Blidget Pro’s appearance
- customize the feed’s layout (supposedly images are coming soon!)
- add multiple tabs to the widget (such as Twitter, blog feeds, etc)

Here is an example using:
- my Facebook Badge as my Blidget’s header
- three tabs: my Facebook feed, my Twitter feed and my blog feed

Learn more about the Blidget Pro and read other Tutorials

The latest Blidget Pro enhancement is a very big one:

You can now turn your Blidget Pro into Facebook Applications!

That’s right: your Blidget Pro is now fully Facebook compatible. It runs on the profile page, has its own ‘canvas page’, is sharable, and hits the Facebook newsfeed…. meaning your Blidget Pro is ready to be viral and shared across your network of friends and colleagues. The best part: it’s another feature included in the Blidget Pro package.

Below are a few screenshots demonstrating how simple it is to turn your widget into a Facebook App. To get started, simply:

- Go to “My Widgetbox”
- Pick which Blidget Pro you want and go the “Mange My Widget” page
- Then click the “Make a Facebook App” button:

Customize Your App

Walk through the step-by-step flow… it’s just a few simple steps. You’ll be able to customize the look of version that appears directly on the Facebook Profile:

Facebook App: On The Profile

You will have two versions of the Facebook App: one for your profile page (think of it like a mini-app) and the full version on the canvas page:

Facebook App: Full Canvas Page

Learn more about the Blidget Pro and read other Tutorials

]]> http://blog.widgetbox.com/2009/03/turn-your-widgets-into-facebook-apps-with-blidget-pro/feed/ 21 http://blog.widgetbox.com/2009/03/introducing-kijijis-classifieds-widgets/ http://blog.widgetbox.com/2009/03/introducing-kijijis-classifieds-widgets/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:04:56 +0000 Jillian Jones http://blog.widgetbox.com/?p=1148 Kijiji, eBay’s popular free classifieds site, now has widgets for six of their popular classifieds sites:
- Atlanta Classifieds
- Chicago Classifieds
- Detroit Classifieds
- Houston Classifieds
- New York Classifieds
- Los Angeles Classifieds

For each of these cities, Kijiji’s widgets dyanmically feature classifieds listings from the community. There is a tab for all listings, jobs, pets, real estate / housing and motors. Kijiji features 100,000s of listings and attracts millions of monthly visitors – so the widgets are a powerful way to keep track of what’s new in each region and across different verticals.

Across the world, there are over 1,000 Kijiji cities and nearly 200 in the United States alone.

Free Houston Classifieds

Free New York Classifieds

Free Chicago Classifieds

Or use the Kijiji Widget Gallery: