The New York Times devoted an article to widgets yesterday – you know the kind that are typically found on blog sidebars. It was only in the last two years that widgets have started to gain a strong momentum. Bloggers thrive on them and now there’s an overpriced conference for widgets as well as many widget-focused startups.
The point of a widget is generally to convey a small bit of information to the user in a creative way, adding to the overall character of the blog at hand. However, often times blog authors overburden their blogs with widgets and draw attention away from their content. I tend to concur with what Valleywag had to say on this issue – that widgets detract from a blog. The occasional one or two widgets are more than acceptable but after that it can wreak havoc.
For me one of the biggest problems with widgets is the fact that they rely on remote servers and thus increase loading times. You may have noticed that my Twitter badge/widget is down at the moment. That’s because it was adding at least 5 seconds to the loading time of this blog. I’ll put it back up very soon after I make my own using Twitter’s RSS feed and a cached RSS parser.
Now to the point of this post, how do you feel about widgets? Do you like them, loathe them? Which ones do you use, if any?
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I hate widgets, mainly because the majority of them are designed by people who put things together for the lowest common denominator, and unfortunately for them, my blogs and sites are actually well-designed so a shitty widget makes them look like a trash heap. The MyBlogLog widget is the epitome of what an ugly widget looks like.
Another problem is that they only solve individual problems or do singular things — show Flickr images, show Last.fm songs, etc. — so you need to have multiple ones on your page if you want to provide your users with anything useful.
If I were ever to put together a widget it would have to do multiple things at once (replace other widgets) while looking just as good or better as the site it is sitting on.
Basically feel the same way as you… it’s a great idea for a couple of pieces of information you deem necessary to put forth to your users, but when you just start adding them to add them, they really distract from the main content, draw you attention away and create clutter… not to mention load times.
I think many people use them to subsidize content as well. They’ll throw a stock pile of them on a site to make it appear as if there is a ton of fresh content, when really it’s just a pile of useless information and the main content goes un-updated.
And yeah, what’s up with the Twitter script? I’m surprised that you just now noticed this. Mine’s been lagging my whole site since Twitter first came out. I loved it so much I was willing to put up with it until I found out that it was actually causing IE to pop up a dialog that the site couldn’t load and the reject the user from seeing my site. I nuked it right then and there. There’s definitely a market for a good cached Twitter widget, wordpress plugin or script. I’m actually surprised being how popular Twitter is and how cool the devs seem to be that they haven’t addressed this, but it’s been well over many months of this behavior, so who knows…
I keep widgets to a bare minimum. I only put the MyBlogLog widget on my blog and only after blending it with my theme. It takes too long to fetch all the other information from other sites as it is and I don’t want my readers to wait until my blog loads to read what I have to write.
I say if it’s got a purpose, leave it there. Seriously, no one wants to listen to what you’re listening to on Last.fm.
Widgets–ugh! The one I most loathe is Snap Preview. I just want to read blog postings and not have little windows thrown up obnoxiously in my face. Bloggers–please don’t put such slop on your blogs! IThey are invitations to visitors to leave forthwith. They waste the time of speed-driven visitors. Not good.
I agree with the first commenter that widgets are usually quite ugly, I try to keep a minimal design on my blogs and most of the widgets are anything but with little customization.
I only use the MyBlogLog widget currently, although I have thought about adding a flickr badge.
It depends with widgets… If they’re not too distracting, then I don’t mind them, and sometimes even like them.
One thing I do hate are widgets that aren’t AJAX/Javascript-powered, so the entire page refreshes if you click one of their buttons.
I *hate* widgets, the only one I use is MyBlogLog and all that does is add images (no javascript/flash).
Just to clarify, most people use the javascript version of the MyBlogLog widget, but because I’m hosted on wordpress.com I have to use the images only version. More info here:
http://engtech.wordpress.com/2007/01/15/mybloglog-widget-for-wordpresscom-blogs-one-of-the-best-web-widgets-available/
MyBlogLog = Hell
I don’t use widgets on my blog. I prefer a lightweight web site layout that loads in a reasonable time. If a web site takes too long to load then it can put people off. I think a lot of widgets can end up bloating and cluttering up a web site.
I agree with you about the remote servers increasing load time. This is not only a problem with widgets but any content that is delivered from a remote server. I try to keep such remote server access to a minimum.
too many widgets makes your web page heavyyyy.
2-3 is enough.
Paul,
What are you using now to get your Twitter status to your sidebar? I’m searching for a way to do the same.
I love them until I realized what am impact they’re having on my site. I’m now trying to extract any static html that’s produced within them and just put this straight up in my templates instead.
As I came from Movable Type to Wordpress, pretty much the only thing that I miss about MT, is that all pages can be produced ready to deliver statically, so no dynamic server calls.