Creating Great Slideshow Widgets with Blidget Pro

Jillian Jones — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:24:18 +0000

The Blidget Pro makes it easy to turn RSS feeds into great-looking, customizable slideshow widgets. Here’s a step by step tutorial and, as you build your own, add links to them in the comments… we will do our best to highlight the most interesting and innovative versions!

Grab an RSS Feed with Great Images

Lots of websites and blogs are filled with great photos – and if you are using services like Flickr or Wordpress, you can easily grab RSS feeds with your images. For example, Flickr users have image-rich RSS feeds for their photostreams. At the bottom of user photostreams (see jryrob’s here), you can grab RSS feeds of the latest photos and geo-tagged photos.

Once you’ve found the ideal RSS feed for your slideshow, you can get started using the Blidget Pro!

Remember- using the Blidget Pro’s new tab features, you are able to add multiple photostreams or feeds the slideshow.

Select a Great Background Image

Using the Blidget Pro’s custom “Full Background” layout, you can set any background image for your slideshow. The image we’ve decided to use here is a Polaroid picture, which works perfectly as the body for our new images:

Set Up “Slideshow” Layout

In the Blidget Pro editor’s “Choose Default Appearance” settings:

- Select “Full Background” layout for your Blidget Pro
- Input the URL of your image’s asset (gif, jpg, png or swf)
- Optional: input a Link URL where you want the background to link to
- Set the “Padding” for where you want the slideshow / images to appear atop the background

In the editor’s “Customize Blidget Content” settings:

- Choose “Slideshow” for the Layout Mode
- Make sure that “Include Images” is checked
- Optional: Check include summaries if you want text below or beside the images
- Optional: Add a label for your photos – particularly if you intend to have additional tabs

Grab Your Widget & Go!

This is what our sample looks like:

Learn more about the Blidget Pro and read other Tutorials

Social Widgets to Make Your Blog & Content Viral

Jillian Jones — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:10:58 +0000

If you’re a blogger – you just *might* be interested in sharing your content and posts with additional readers…. now you you can easily make your content go viral with these easy to add widgets from Widgetbox developer Bastawhiz!

These social widgets are easily embeddable via javascript and pull the page’s URL for dynamic submission to social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, etc – effectively enabling readers to share your content and other users to find it!

The best location for these widgets is actually in your blog’s template. Placing one or all of these widgets onto your “Main Index Page” and “Single Post” templates (the terminology for Wordpress) allows you to share your content by only touching your template once!