12 Places Where You Can Create Widgets And Promote Widgets

In my humble opinion, widgets represent object oriented programming on steroids. One of the first things we learn when we become programmers is to encapsulate our code! Make sure your code is reusable! Now, when we look at widgets, we can see just how beneficial code reuse can be when it comes to slashing development time and making money. We see examples of widgets everywhere -MySpace, FaceBook, on our desktops! So where can you go to use your fantastic skills to create the next awesome widget that everyone in the world will want to run over and download? You can go to many places! I’m going to show you a few of those places in this article. These sites allow you to create widgets that you can then syndicate and share with the world. The last place on the list, Widgipedia, is a site that allows you to promote your widgets and see the widgets that other people have created. (It’s a great site for inspiration!) Here we go!

WidgetBox

WidgetBox is a great place to go when you need to create a widget quickly and easily. The interface is beautiful and the system is very simple to use.

Google Web Toolkit

Where would the world be without Google! Google delivers yet another quality framework to us to further pull us deeper into the Google-Plan-Of-World-Domination. I, for one, am going along willingly! This Google toolkit outlines how you can use widgets that already exists as well as how you can create your own widgets.

KickApps

KickApps allows you to create social media widgets that you can then syndicate using their network. You have to join their site. When you do, their system automatically creates a social community for you. It’s like your very own miniaturized MySpace community. You can have members. After that, you gain access to their widget builder and their syndication network. It’s a very nice AND popular system.

Once you have created an account and signed in, click on Deploy and then click on Widget Studio Beta. This will allow you to create widgets. They even have templates to start you off.

Yahoo Widgets

The Yahoo Widget tools, also known as Konfabulator, offer you a wealth of items for widget creation including a widget converter to take your widgets across platforms, a widget creation script that lets PhotoShop users export their creations into a widget, widget downloaders to allow you to make your widget easily available to those who want/need it, widget class library and much, much, more.

SpringWidgets

SpringWidgets offers a great tutorial as well as a widget development kit you can use to create widgets. They also have samples you can use for inspiration.

Widsets

Widsets allows you to create widgets for mobile phones. They support over 300 model phone models and offer you powerful development tools to get your widget mobilized (small joke – pun intended :-).

Yahoo Mobile

The Yahoo Mobile developer platform allows you to create widgets for mobile phones. The developer kit is in beta, however, the feature set is sold. You can build your widget, test it and submit it to Yahoo Mobile Widget Gallery all in one place. The gallery is a great promotional tool for your widget.

Grazr

Grazr is a great site for creating widgets, although you may have to read their tutorial to get yourself going. I don’t think it’s as intuitive and user friendly as some of the other sites, however, it offers you a great set of features.

Wigitize

Now Wigitize.com really isn’t a site that you can use to create or promote your widgets, however, it is a site you can use to create a widget to promote your site. I thought about a few useful things you could to with Wigitize. Wigitize allows you to output your RSS feed into a widget that people can display on their sites. You could take the code that Wigitize gives you and put a link on your site that says “Put the PageChain.net widget on your site!” and allow people to get the code to add your updates to their site. That’s a handy little feature to offer! Or, if you can’t stay away from PageChain.net (or some other site) you could create a widget for PageChain and add it to your site yourself. That way you will always know when I’ve udpated the site. So although you can’t build mountains with Wigitize, you can at least create a widget that lets people in on what you are doing.