Photo Courtesy of Scott Beale (Laughing Squid)”
Greetings from WordCamp! So far there’s quite a few people here. Some great stuff happening here.
The first session just began. Andy Skelton, fabled Automattic developer, is presenting on the topic of WordPress Widgets.
Widgets give bloggers the ability to drag and drop widgets, or modules, and modify the way sidebars are displayed. More to come.
Additionally: Andy has opened the floor up for widget authors to talk about their widgets.
- RawSugar has provided a widget tag cloud that allows searches across blogs. Any search in RawSugar has an RSS feed associated with it.
- Goodstorm is developing a widget called MeCommerce. Great way to seel things from a blog, a la Amazon. Goodstorm was the company who provided the WordCamp tee shirts.
Editorial: I personally have just recently been turned on to widgets, though they’ve been around for awhile. Technosailor has been widgetized and being able to simply put modules in by drag and drop as opposed to hacking out PHP. I recommend anyone with a WordPress blog to experiment with widgets.
RawSugar
I feel like it is important to talk a little more about RawSugar. It is a search engine for tagged content. Bill is doing a live demo on it now. I’ve posed the question that this doesn’t appear any different on the surface from Technorati, but the difference is in blog-local searching. Another atendee wonders why we can’t use Ultimate Tag Warrior instead. Basically, the difference is in live drilldown. Presumable Ajax?
The Widgets plugin is available at http://www.automattic.com/code/widgets. Additionally, over 100 widgets are linked at the Widgets blog.
