Widgeting.

Was working on adding more widgets to my blog last night. Was trying to add Blogumus, the Blogger version of the aesthetically pleasing WP-Cumulus by Roy Tanck, which has now been officially 'adopted' by Wordpress. It's a gorgeous flash and javascript label cloud which allows your blog labels to literally float and rotate in a cloud, according to your mouse movements. Click here to view a sample. Unfortunately, for some damned reason, the supposedly hassle free install didn't work for me, and nothing appeared. Hopefully the coding gets fixed sometime soon though.

After giving up on that, I came across the Grooveshark Widget website. For those of you who don't know (I didn't know what it was either), Grooveshark is a free online music database, and the widget page allows you to create and customize your own widget by choosing what colors you want it to be, and what songs you want to have in it.

So I added 930 songs to mine in 2 minutes, just by adding playlists made up by other people. Cheating? Yes, I know. But this just demonstrates the ease of use of the website. My playlist is made up of only 3 artists, Armin Van Buuren, Paul Van Dyk and ATB. Mmmmm...my favourites.  XD

After clicking on 'Finish', then came the most time consuming part...uploading it as a widget to my blog. The website might be called Grooveshark Widget, but it doesn't actually give you a widget. It just gives you the flash code to add to your site. This might be fine if I had an actually website to add it to, but I don't. I was trying to add it to my sidebar as a widget.

What I eventually ended up doing was using Widgetbox to convert the code into a proper widget to be added into my sidebar. Though that worked fairly well, and was pretty easy to do, I now have to put up with the occasional advert located in the widget itself. However, I consider that a small price to pay for the many hours of wonderful music I now have at my fingertips. In addition, with the discovery of Widgetbox, I now do not have to limit myself to the (usually) crappy widgets that Blogger provides, but am able to make a widget out of virtually anything at all. Très cool, is it not?

Do check out my new widget if you have the time. Like certain other widgets I've added and deleted in the past, this one will only stay up for as long as it continues to amuse me. :P

Now if I could only get Blogumus to work...

Update: Managed to find something within the existing Blogger widgets that's a lame, sub par substitute of Blogumus/WP-Cumulus. Decided to install it anyway in my sidebar, though it's nowhere near as pretty as the original. I've already spent too much time trying to install Blogumus here.