Simpy Chichimichi

Simpy Linkroll Widgets

A number of people asked about including their Simpy links in their blogs. Typically that's done through a "sidebar widget", commonly known as "linkroll". Thanks to the friendly folks at MuseStorm, you now have a choice of several such Simpy widgets, and I'm about to demonstrate a few.

The following three widget options pull links from the global index of Simpy users' public links. In other words, these widgets are great for monitoring topics of interest and discovery of new and interesting links.

Three Widget Choices

Search Widget	Tag Widget	Query Widget

Here are the explanations of each widget:

• Search Widget is the simplest. It offers you and your blog readers to search Simpy from your blog and stay on your blog.
• Tag Widget shows all public links recently tagged with the given tag.
• Query Widget is much like the Tag Widget, but it shows that you can provide more complex queries. This lets you construct your widget with a more precise query, thus weeding out the uninteresting stuff.

Adding Widgets to a Blog

So, how do you get these widgets to your blog? That's easy, just copy and paste one of the following somewhere in your blog, most likely in one of the sidebar templates.

You will notice the bolded portions of Tag Widget and Query Widget. Those portions are for you to change. Enter whichever tag or query you want in there, and the widget will pull it from Simpy for you. If you need help with this, email me.

Customizing the Simpy Linkroll Widget

But what if you don't like that brushed metal look? What if your blog uses different colours? The folks at MuseStorm thought of that. As of this writing, they've provided 36 different widget styles, and you get to pick the one you want.

Linkrolling Your Own Links

As I said above, these widgets will pull links from the global link index. While this is great for finding new and interesting links, you may want to show your blog readers what you have been bookmarking and tagging. Well, note the title of this post - "Simpy Widgets, Part 1". In Part 2 I will show how to linkroll your own links with a Simpy widget.

Update: From the comments - instructions (with screenshots) for adding widgets to common blogging platforms like Blogger and Wordpress can be found here. Enjoy!