Fashion Blog Widgets

Blogs live on freshness, and blog widgets were the machinery that spread that freshness around. A fashion blog widget let website owners put fashion blog posts onto their own websites: a small panel showing the latest posts from a blogging source, refreshed automatically, that could sit in a sidebar, on a portal page, or — a true marker of its era — inside a MySpace profile. The posts in this widget came from the blogging section of the Fashion Newspaper website, a sister publication in the Apparel Search family, so a site carrying the widget offered its visitors a running stream of fashion commentary without writing a word of it.

For bloggers themselves, widgets ran in both directions: you placed other people’s widgets to fill your sidebar, and you offered your own feed as a widget so other sites would carry you. This page explains how that exchange worked, why it ended when its platform closed, and which of its ideas — above all RSS — are still working today.

How Blog Widgets Spread Posts Around

The unit of a blog widget was the recent-posts list: titles, dates, a line or two of each new post, linked back to the blog itself. The host pasted in a short block of code, chose a size — the height and width of the box could be changed by finding the width and height numbers in the code, and the box could even be stretched by dragging its edges with the mouse — and from then on the panel kept itself current. On a blog, the widget usually lived in the sidebar among the blogroll and the archive links; on a profile page it was often the most professional-looking thing there. Every new post at the source appeared in dozens of sidebars at once, which is why bloggers courted widget placements the way they later courted social shares.

The sidebar the widget lived in deserves a word of its own, because it was the blog’s front porch. Alongside the recent-posts widget sat the blogroll — the hand-picked list of blogs the writer actually read — the archive by month, a short biography and, increasingly, buttons for the new social networks. Readers judged a blog partly by that furniture: a well-kept sidebar signalled a writer plugged into a living conversation. The widget’s contribution was motion in that still arrangement, a panel that changed even on days the blog’s owner had not posted, keeping the porch looking occupied.

Why the Blog Widgets Ended

These widgets were built on SpringWidgets, a platform that launched in 2006. In an effort to control costs and consolidate products, MySpace parent company Fox Interactive Media shuttered SpringWidgets and Flektor, acquired in 2007. A blog widget is only ever a window onto a platform’s servers, so the closure switched every window off together, on every blog and profile that carried one. The code was removed and no support is offered for it — the honest position for any widget whose platform is gone. The wider lesson shaped the modern web: bloggers moved their syndication to channels they controlled, and the sidebar box gave way to the follow button, the newsletter signup and the feed.

The RSS Route That Still Works

One part of the widget system was never dependent on SpringWidgets at all: RSS. Anyone familiar with using RSS could take the underlying feeds directly, and still can — a feed reader, a feed-driven page or a modern newsletter tool can follow a publication’s posts without borrowing its layout or its platform. The starting points are the feed directory and the blog landscape itself:

• RSS News Feeds — the feeds behind the widget system
• Fashion Newspaper — the publication whose blogging section fed the widget
• Fashion Blogs
• Fashion News
• Fashion Jobs

Read as a whole, the blog widget’s story is the story of the early social web in one sidebar: write once, syndicate everywhere, and trust a platform to carry you — until the platform decides otherwise. The writers who came through it best were the ones whose own sites were worth visiting in their own right. Explore the rest of fashion on Apparel Search for the directories those blogs wrote about.