frogblog

When I was a little girl, I loved tiny things. I had a room full of them. Teensy-weensy plastic animals, a delicate miniature porcelain tea service, 80 million Barbie shoes… My poor mom.

This cute little fascination lasted into adulthood; I talked my son into giving me one of his micro-machines when he was in preschool. It was a lime green 50s-looking car. Too cool. I kept it in an itsy-bitsy glass curio case full of other itsy-bitsy things.

Being a grown-up geeky girl with a tendency to travel light, I don’t have much tiny stuff anymore (although I do have a little red Eiffel Tower and a red majolica poodle from the 40s on my desk…). These days, I mostly get my cute little fancy tickled by widgets. Even the word is adorable, isn’t it?

The term used to refer to a non-specific, small mechanical thingamajig, maybe something you’d find in a plumber’s toolbox. But today, a widget is a little box that displays info on a web page. Widgets are interactive, which means that they don’t just sit there and look cute; they actually do something.

One of my favorite websites, Etsy, made a widget that sellers on the site can use to put a mini store on their own blogs and sites. Advertisers are capitalizing on the widget trend. A huge improvement over those infuriating, migraine-inducing Flash ads that make my fans kick in at full blast… If only those would all go away.

Today I discovered my favorite widget of all time! I’m biased, of course. It’s a Vincent widget. He has some of his music up on SoundClick, and they’ve added code you can use to put a widget on your site and play all the songs in an artist’s songlist.

Isn’t my Vincent widget cute?

Being a techie and creative boy, Vincent built a few of his own little Flash players for his music. You can see mini Radio Vince in the banner of his blog and, on his website, he’s got Radio Vince (click “a single mouse click away“). You can get to players for most of his songs here, and others here. He widgetized himself years ago, long before it became The Thing To Do. So avant garde.

I think one of these days when I’m bored I’m going to check out some widget makers and play around with them. I have multiple Internet incarnations I could work with…I wanna widget!