The following 12 standard Edublogs Widgets are available for use on all blogs (i.e. Free Edublogs blogs, Edublogs supporter blogs and Edublogs Campus blogs).
Archives Widget
The Archives widget shows a monthly archive of your posts.
Bloggers use the archives widget in their sidebar so they and their readers can easily access previous months or years posts. For example, clicking on a May 2009 archive link displays all your posts written in that month.
To reduce sidebar clutter i’ts better to display archives as a drop down.
Blog Avatar Widget
The Blog Avatar widget allows you to display an image that represents your blog. You upload an image for your blog avatar via Settings > Blog Avatar.
For Edublogs supporters, your blog avatar is used when your blog is displayed in the Edublogs Supporter area on Edublogs homepage.
Calendar Widget
The calendar widget creates a calendar in your sidebar with clickable links to your blogs posts for particular dates. Dates that appear in bold type indicate dates you’ve posted.
It doesn’t let you setup a calendar of events . It’s only use is to display links to your posts by date. For an events calendar – refer to How To Embed A Google Calendar In Your Blog Sidebar
Categories Widget
The categories widget lists the categories you use making it easier for readers to navigate your content.
As a general rule it’s best to limit the total number of categories that you use on your blog to less than 10.
See Also: Adding Categories and Tags into your Posts.
Links Widget
The Links widget display any links you’ve added via Links > Add New.
Bloggers use the links widget to:
- Display their blog roll
- Sharing websites they recommend to readers.
A blogroll is a list of your favourite blogs in your blog sidebar. One of the reasons for adding a blogroll is so your readers can use this list to locate other blogs worth reading — you are saying “these are some blogs I like – which are worth checking out!”
There is a wide range of configuration options (as shown below) but in most cases bloggers use ’show link name’ only.
Meta Widget
The Meta widget provides a series of links including:
- Your blog dashboard (click on Site Admin when you are logged into your account)
- Log in/out
- Entries RSS (your post RSS feed URL)
- Comments RSS (your comment RSS feed URL)
Educators use this as an easy way for students to login into their blog dashboard.
Pages Widget
The Pages widget is used to adds a list of your blogs pages to your sidebar. You would normally use a Pages Widget on blog themes that don’t have navigation tabs across the top of the theme.
You can customise the Page widget to list pages by:
- Page title – this displays the pages in alphabetical order
- Page order – use this option to display pages your preferred order – follow Changing Page Order in your blog’s navigation instructions
- Page ID – this displays the pages in the pages were first created in your Dashboard
The Exclude option is used to if you want to keep certain pages from being listed in the widget.
You exclude pages as follows:
- Locate the Page ID you want to exclude by going to Pages > Edit
- Hover over the title of the page you want to exclude.
- The status bar of your browser will display a URL with a numeric ID at the end. This is the page ID.
- Enter the Page IDs; separate by commas if more than one Page ID and click Save.
Recent Comments Widget
The recent comments widget displays the most up-to-date comments left on your blog. Educators use this widget because seeing recently approved comments in the sidebar can be very motivating for students.
Recent Posts Widget
The recent posts widget is similar to the Recent Comments widget except it gives the titles of your most recently published content. This helps readers quickly see what’s new so they can easily located your latest posts.
Search
The search widget adds a search tool so your readers and you can easily to locate information on your blog.
Tag Cloud Widget
The Category widget, Tag cloud widget and Search Widget are all important widgets for making it easier for your readers to locate information on your blog.
The tag cloud widget displays your tags so the larger the size of the word in the tag cloud the more posts that have been tagged using that term. This quickly lets your readers know the things you write most commonly about.
See Also: Adding Categories and Tags into your Posts.
Text Widget
The text widget is the most popular widget because you can use it for lots of different purposes. It allows you to add simple text, display links, insert images, embed HTML code. You can use as many text widgets in your sidebars, each with different content.
For examples of how to use a Text Widget check out:
