Britannica Widgets

Encyclopaedia Britannica has recently made a series of widgets available which can be embedded into a blog or website. They come in a variety of "flavors," e.g. U.S. Presidents, brain, dogs, philosophy, with more to come.

The widgets are dynamic and show a snippet of information about one of several topics under that particular heading. There is also a link to the article in Britannica itself. One caveat is that the version of Britannica used is the commercial version which is different from the version many schools and colleges use. But it's still a pretty nifty little series of tools.

I've embedded several into the library web pages. See, for example, the page on U.S. history which uses the U.S. Presidents widget.

For more info on the widgets and to watch a video about how easy it is to embed them in your site go to Brtiannica's Assets & Widgets page.

eSchool News Adds Widgets

I've added a new widget to the blog (see under Technorati widget) which provides an easy link to eSchool News, a well-known print and online newsletter for the educational community.

I chose to add the Technology News widget since this blog is mostly about tech, but there are two other options--one lists Headlines from eSchool News and the other offers Funding resources. Go to eSchool News to explore the options.

It was very easy to add to Blogger because they offer a direct upload feature from Widgetbox which immediately opens the Blogger edit layout mode from which you can place the widget where you desire on the blog page. Code for Facebook, TypePad, MySpace, and other social networking sites are also available.

Give it a look and you may want to add one of the widgets to your blog or web page.

Amazon Wish List Widget

I was just able to add a widget for an Amazon Wish List to my library news blog.

In order to do it, of course you have have an Amazon account which can be made public. Since I have two separate accounts, one personal and one for school, I was able to designate which one I wanted made public.

Once you've gone through the steps there is a place on the Wish List page which allows you to share your wish list in various ways. I chose to use a widget since I'm still not set up to email all my parents, students, etc. (I'll do that eventually as well).
I put the widget on the news blog because that made the most sense to me and I don't really have room for it on my main page at this point. However, I was able to put a button on the page which links to the wish list. I also found the code for the button on the Amazon's Wish List page.

I also posted an article in the parent newsletter recently (you can find it on the news blog as well) which explains several ways parents (anyone viewing at the website) can contribute to the library. It includes buying through Amazon Associates account, a new product called GiftLit, and a link to our local independent bookstore.

Check it out. You may find it useful.

LibraryThing on my website (Week 8, #19)

I did go ahead and add a LibraryThing widget to the library home page. It's still a work in progress. I tried experimenting with book covers but found that some books didn't have covers and came up with the little icon that indicates a nonexistent graphic file. I didn't like that. There is an option to only show books with a cover picture but it hasn't worked properly yet. So for now I just have the titles listed (only 4 currently because I don't want the list to go off the screen). I have a link to the whole list right at the top of the box, however, so the user can just click on that. I also see that by clicking on the "D" format once you get to the LibraryThing page you can order the materials by the date they were added which might be useful. Unfortunately there's no way you can know that except by experimenting. Perhaps I can find a way of making that the default. I just haven't found it yet.
I also started adding tags to the titles. It takes a little time but in the long run I think it could be useful.
Another really neat thing about LT is that if you click on the title of the work it takes you to a page which shows similar items (based, I assume on tagging) and if you click on the cover picture it takes you to Amazon.com. That's useful for us because we've been adding a link to Amazon for every book we have in our library and this just gives us a slightly easier way to find the record for a particular book.
Interactive, collaborative, powerful!!!!! Library 2.0