The trouble with widgets

I love widgets. They're such a great way to add value and information to your blog. I've added a whole heap of them to WebWeaver's World, as you can see. I like playing around with widgets and adapting them to my own needs, or to the look and feel of my blog. I'm not skilled enough to invent and create my own widgets, but I can certainly tweak already existing ones, to "make them my own".

Sometimes though they can be a bit of a pain. That's because, even though I tweak them, they still "belong" to someone else. That is, they are still controlled elsewhere. And sometimes even the best of them have a little hiccup along the way.

Over the last few days, for example, a bunch of my widgets have been misbehaving in various ways.

My very wonderful Archive Calendar Widget from phydeaux3 seemed not to have noticed for a few days that I'd put up a new blog post - so it didn't appear on the calendar or in the archive list for a while. No drama, and it's all fixed now, I was just a bit sad that had forgotten me!

Today, the most excellent Technorati Ranking widget from PurpleMoggy seems to have forgotten how to measure my ranking (it does that sometimes - some glitch at the Technorati end) so it looks like I have 0 links from 0 blogs. Waaa! Still have my ranking, though, which is good. It'll fix itself up again soon I'm sure.

The most annoying one right now is my Most Popular Blog Posts widget from AffiliateBrand. For the last couple of days my all-singing all-dancing restyled version has been displaying horribly - with the list of posts all jammed up in the left-hand side of the iFrame, and a great big gap to the right of each one. Ugh! So here I am, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, trying to figure out why, and to force it to display properly again. Which isn't easy, seeing as most of the visual controls live at AffiliateBrand, and not on my blog.

Ah well, I always did like a challenge. And I'm sure I'll figure out a way to fix it - somehow. Apologies for the not-perfect look of my blog in the meantime though. I don't like it at all when my blog doesn't look right.

UPDATE later the same day: Fixed it! (In Firefox, anyway - I'll have to check IE at work tomorrow). Yaay!

Technorati tags: Blogger beta, Blogger, blogging, widgets, hacks, archive calendar, phydeaux3, Technorati ranking, PurpleMoggy, most popular posts, AffiliateBrand, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.