By : Nidhi Gupta

Widgets are things you can put in your WordPress blog’s sidebar without knowing how to edit a web page. In easier terms we can say, Widgets are those parts which are broken down the sidebars in themes into discrete blocks of goodness, and created an interface for user to add, delete, and rearrange them by simply dragging and dropping. It’s as easy as falling off a blog.

“Widgets” is buzzword chosen for this sidebar-chopping plug-in. They could have been called Gadgets or Gizmos or Wizbangs or Whatevers. On the surface, they are just things you can use to personalize your WordPress site without knowing HTML. Way down deep, they may be something entirely more significant.

The widgets are basic right now, things like search, categories, pages, etc, but the process of going on for anyone to create their own widgets. (It’s as writing a single function and wrapping it in a WordPress plugin.)

By installing the Widgets plugin by Automattic and using a widget-ready theme, you can bring the popular customization feature from WordPress.com to your very own.

Not all widgets are available on blogs hosted by WordPress.com. You can install any widget you like on your own blog WordPress version 2.2 includes the Widgets feature. There is no need to download the plugin if you are running WordPress 2.2 or later.

At last, Widgets are an easy way for you to arrange and rearrange your sidebar to your hearts content without touching a line of code. One can arite its own widgets. Writing a WordPress Widget is as easy as writing a plugin.

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By : Elinor Mills

In its attempts to add social elements to products, is Google pulling a Facebook?

Google Reader has allowed people to share items they are interested in with others since 2006 with hyperlinks, clips on blogs and storing them on a public page that you had to know the URL for to see.

Last week, Google tweaked Google Reader so that your shared items are automatically made available to your Google Talk contacts.

But, as anyone who uses instant messaging knows, not all of your IM contacts are friends. Many are acquaintances or people you barely know and with whom you may not want to share a reading list.

Recently, Facebook was forced to modify its new Beacon ad targeting service that notifies friends in your network when you buy things on sites of Facebook partners. Facebook made that an opt-in feature, however, after consumer groups and Facebook members complained the service violated people’s privacy.

Google, too, has been crucified in the blogosphere over its Google Reader change, with bloggers saying the Google Talk contact sharing feature should be opt in, not opt out.

To calm the masses, Google posted an item on the Google Reader Blog that explains the company’s reasoning behind the change and tells how to clear the shared-items list and how to tag items to share with a limited number of people.

Source: News.com

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