The Widget MD

Some Widgets Carry Virus's

2010-03-04T21:35:00.000-08:00

Make sure the widgets you choose are reliable and don't wreak havoc with your blog. The major players like Twitter, Facebook and the like are constantly under attack by hackers. Know your widget creator before you add them to your blog.

Is There a Widget Dr. In The House?

2010-02-25T21:10:00.000-08:00

When I'm building a blog and I am in the widget adding stage I'll go to the blog's dashboard or layout and see what my choices are. I might add a weather widget or calendar, I most always add a Twitter feed and RSS functionality but I have been known to do tag clouds, Wordles, and a whole bunch of others.

For those new to widgets, they are small applications written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - Web technology, moved to the local host. These widgets provide front-ends to all kinds of information sources on the Web; several thousand are available for download.

Obviously, the use of Web technologies has been a huge success, enabling people to adapt their programming experience from the Web to their local platform. I typically use Google and Wordpress blogs and they have their own widget platforms, but others do too, Yahoo and Microsoft have widget (or gadget) engines of their own.

It would be so sweet if someday there was a program that offered a standard packaging format for widgets.

Is Your Widget Sick?

2010-02-25T20:47:00.000-08:00

Call the Widget Doctor! There are widgets out there that are vulnerable to attack. Triggering the vulnerability might not take an e-mail, but involve a network attack, or, maybe, a malicious blog post, a photo description, or some interaction on a social networking site. Or the widget itself might come from a malicious source. (as I found out the hard way with a Twitter widget)

The point here is that we're dealing with a shift in what Web-style programming can achieve -- and that that shift does not come without risk, and responsibility. A shift, incidentally, that extends beyond just Widgets, as Web technology is also becoming the programming platform of choice for mobile devices, and as the capabilities of Web applications that run in the classical browser are extended, more trained widget doctors will be needed.