Free widgets for your web page or blog

I’m continuing the clock theme of the last couple of posts. When I posted about Daylight Saving Time I included a live clock at the bottom of the post, displaying current Eastern Time (eastern Canada and US). Someone contact me, asking how he could get such a clock for his web site.

I’m old enough to recall the early days of web building. When we wanted some fancy gadget, we usually had to code it ourselves. Code was often shared with others, but often required customization to work with a particular site.

These days it’s much simpler, as many such add-ons are developed by organizations who distribute them as easily-installed packages. Other developers host the tools on their own servers, so that we can display them on our own sites just by inserting code that links to the host server.

There are all kinds of free widgets available to display on your web site. In addition to clocks there are weather reports, stock tickers, sports scores, world population counters and national debt trackers.

Installation, if you can call it that, could not be easier. Just copy the HTML code given by the provider and paste it into your web page or HTML editor of your blog. Yes, it’s that simple.

The analog clock I chose came from clocklink.com, but there are similar ones at worldtimeserver.com other similar providers. Just search for “web clock” and you’ll find plenty. At the bottom of this article, I’ve added a few free widgets to give you some ideas.