Fashion Widgets

A fashion widget is a small piece of the web that does one useful job inside somebody else’s page. In computing, a web widget is a software widget for the web: a small application with limited functionality that can be installed and executed within a web page by an end user. It occupies a portion of a webpage and does something useful with information fetched from other websites and displayed in place — a headline box that updates itself, a panel of new garments, a list of the latest jobs. A fashion widget is simply that idea dressed for this industry: a widget designed to be relevant to some aspect of clothing, style or the fashion business.

This section gathers the widgets Apparel Search created for fashion websites and blogs: news, blog, article, jobs and model widgets that site owners could paste into their own pages, plus an example shopping widget. Each one is explained on its own page below — what it showed, where its content came from, and what became of it. The short version of that story is that the platform behind most of them closed years ago, so the widgets themselves no longer run; what survives, and what this hub explains, is the idea itself and the feeds, gadgets and apps that took the widgets’ place.

The Widgets in This Section

Each widget below pulled a different kind of fashion content into the pages that hosted it. Follow the page for the kind you are interested in — together they cover most of what a fashion site of the widget era wanted in its sidebar.

• Fashion News Widgets — headline boxes carrying fashion news into other websites and blogs.
• Fashion Blog Widgets — recent fashion blog posts, syndicated into sidebars and profiles.
• Fashion Article Widgets — fashion industry articles offered to other fashion websites.
• Clothing Industry Jobs Widget — fashion career opportunities a site could show its own visitors.
• Fashion Model Widgets — fashion model images and links for websites and blogs.
• Amazon Widget — an example of a shopping widget, showing fashion products inside a page.

What Is a Widget, Exactly?

In computer programming, a widget — or control — is an interface element that a computer user interacts with, such as a window or a text box. Widgets are sometimes qualified as virtual to distinguish them from their physical counterparts: virtual buttons that can be clicked with a mouse cursor, as against physical buttons that can be pressed with a finger. Widgets are often packaged together in widget toolkits, and programmers use them to build graphical user interfaces. The web widget borrowed that idea and shrank it: a relatively simple, easy-to-use software application or component, made for one or more software platforms, that a page owner could drop into a page without building anything. On-screen clocks, event countdowns, auction tickers and stock tickers were the familiar early examples; fashion’s versions carried headlines, posts, jobs and products instead.

Widgets, Gadgets and Apps

A gadget is a close cousin: a small tool, such as a machine, that has a particular function, but is often thought of as a novelty. In practice the two words described much the same thing, and both have pretty much been replaced by “apps.” The term fashion apps is now the one to know — “app” is a shortening of “software application,” an application program designed to perform a group of coordinated functions, tasks or activities for the benefit of the user. A mobile app is software designed to run on smartphones and other mobile devices such as a phone, tablet or watch, while a web application runs in a browser, the way webmail, online retail sales, online auctions, wikis and instant messaging services do. The wider story sits in fashion technology, where the tools the industry actually uses today are covered.

Why the Fashion Widgets Stopped Working

The widgets in this section were built on a system from SpringWidgets, a widget platform that launched in 2006. In an effort to control costs and consolidate products, MySpace parent company Fox Interactive Media shuttered SpringWidgets — which had launched in 2006 — and Flektor, which it had acquired in 2007. With the platform gone, the widgets Apparel Search had created on it no longer work, and the embed code that once powered them was removed rather than left to fail on other people’s pages. There is no need to add these widgets to a website today; the pages in this section are kept so the record of what they did, and how they worked, is not lost.

What to Use Instead

The good news is that the job widgets did is still worth doing, and the modern routes are simpler and more durable. Instead of a fashion widget, a site owner may want a fashion gadget — the Apparel Search Gadgets show how gadgets were added to sites — or a fashion app. Syndication itself never died: the Fashion Feeds collect the RSS feeds a site can still build on, and a site can also add a Fashion Industry Search Engine for its visitors. For the content the widgets carried, go straight to the sources: Fashion News, Fashion Jobs and the Fashion Newspaper site, and learn more about fashion across the whole directory.