Fashion Newspaper Gadgets

The Fashion Newspaper Gadgets did for fashion news what a newspaper's front page does for a newsstand: they put the latest headlines where people would see them without trying. Each gadget contained feeds of fashion news, fashion articles and fashion blog posts from the FashionNewspaper.com website, packaged in a 250 x 500 panel that could sit on an iGoogle homepage or be embedded in a fashion blog or website, updating itself as new stories were published.

The gadgets were created with the Google Gadgets API and were retired by events: Google closed the mobile version of iGoogle on July 31, 2012 and the service itself on November 1, 2013, and the gadget code links were removed after that date. Fashion news itself remains a main Apparel Search service, and this page records the newspaper gadgets while pointing readers to the news pages that carry on their job.

Headlines as a Homepage Fixture

News was the most natural gadget content of all. A personalized homepage is checked the way a front door is passed — many times a day, briefly — and a headlines panel fits that habit perfectly: the reader glances, sees whether anything in fashion has happened, and clicks through only when a story earns it. The newspaper gadget fed that glance from the Fashion Newspaper site's output, mixing reported fashion news with articles and blog posts in one stream, so the panel blended hard headlines and commentary the way a real fashion desk does.

Built for Blogs as Well as Readers

The same panel was offered to fashion bloggers and website owners as an embed: a self-updating news column for a sidebar, in exchange for pasting in a script. It carried the gadget program's standard terms — no support for adding the script and no guarantee the script would always work — which was a fair description of a free feed panel running on a third party's platform. While the platform lasted, the arrangement suited everyone: blogs gained fresh headlines without writing them, and the newspaper's stories gained readers on pages the publisher did not own.

Fashion News on Apparel Search Today

The news habit the gadget served is now served directly. The fashion news pages carry the industry's stories, the Fashion Newspaper page describes the newspaper service, and the fashion RSS feeds still push headlines out to readers and other sites in the format that outlasted gadgets. There is even a page for submitting fashion news to Apparel Search, linked here as it was from the gadget pages. The panel is retired; the front page it imitated is still published daily.

Fashion Week, When the Panel Earned Its Place

A headlines gadget justifies itself most during fashion week, when the volume of fashion news multiplies and no reader can visit every source. In those weeks the newspaper panel changed constantly — show reports, collection reviews and business stories arriving through the day — and a glance at a homepage panel genuinely substituted for a round of site visits. The rest of the year it served the quieter function of keeping a blog's sidebar alive: a page whose owner posted weekly could still show today's fashion headlines, which made small fashion sites look attended rather than abandoned.