How to Use Widgets

In order to customize your widgets, you should head to Presentation > Widgets. Widgets enrich a blog with information, interaction, multimedia, links, pictures, and/or whatever a user may choose to add. You can customize which widgets you’d like to add and the position of each widget through a “drag and drop” process where you click on a widget box, hold the mouse down, move the box around, and let go of the mouse when the widget box has reached its destination. Make sure to Save Changes after you’re finished!

Video Widgets

If you wish to post a MySpace, Google, or YouTube video:

1. Copy the URL

2. Title the Video.

3. If you do not know the width or the height of your video, leave the Width and Height boxes blank. If you’d prefer your video to be more stretched out horizontally, choose the 16:9 width:height ratio.

4. Write your URL in this format: VIDEOID@text@VIDEOURL. For example, for a YouTube video with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAQeQeawIac as its URL, one would type CAQeQeawIac@Video@http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAQeQeawIac. It is perfectly fine to have no text proceeding a video, in which case VIDEOID@@VIDEOURL would suffice.

 Text

You may type normal text into the textbox, but the textbox also allows HTML. Thus, you may manipulate this “textbox” by adding pictures, chatboxes (http://www.cbox.ws/ is a good source), and whatever else you may think of as long as you know the HTML code and the width of the item you’re adding is smaller than that of the sidebar itself! A nice place to learn HTML online is: http://www.w3schools.com/.

Links

Your Blogroll will only be viewable to your readers if you add the Links widget. You may alter the content of this widget by managing the Blogroll.

Polls

In order for polls to become functional, you must first activate “WP-Polls” under Plugins and then add the Polls widget to a sidebar (order of action need not matter). Afterwards, Polls will become a new link on the horizontal navigation bar. You will be able create new polls and manage them as you wish with this widget and plugin.

Pages

If you have written or uploaded pages, you must add the Pages widget to a sidebar for them to become visible to your visitors.

Tag Cloud

A “cloud-like” formation of text will appear where popular tags (key topics) will be distinguished from the less popular tags by size. Clicking on a tag will direct you to all the posts tagged with that particular word or phrase. For more information on tags, see the Technical FAQ.