20+ Useful Blogger Widgets and Hacks

Blogger is a great free blog platform that is improving every day. New useful hacks and widgets are being created on a regular basis. Here is a list of some of the very best blogger widgets and blogger hacks that will improve the usability of your blog.

Blogger Hacks

Related Posts Widget
Display related posts beneath each of your blog posts. Links are displayed based on labels given to each post.

Tag Cloud Widget
Display a simple tag cloud in your blog's sidebar. The tags are displayed based upon the labels given to each post.

Random Posts Button
This widget creates a link for your template that directs users to a random post when clicked on.

Change the Favicon
Are you tired of the regular organge favicon provided by blogger? This tutorial will teach you how to display your own customized favicon.

Top Commentators Widget
Reward your readers for commenting on your blog with this widget. The widget displays the names of the top commentators and will direct you to their website when clicked on.

Change the Title Tags for More Search Engine Traffic
This tutorial teaches you how to make your post title show up before your blog title in Google search results. This is very important when it comes to Search Engine Optimization!

Recent Posts with Thumbnails
Grab your readers attention with an appealing recent posts widget which includes thumbnails.

Recent Comments Widget
Make your blog look alive by displaying recent comment discussions.

Digg Vote Button
Let your Digg readers Digg your posts directly from your blog with this handy little widget.

Search Bar for Blogger
This widget displays a small search bar in your blog's footer. Your readers will be able to easily search your blog for specific content.

Table of Contents
Allow your readers to easily navigate through your site with an interactive Table of Contents.

Blog Widgets

Facebook Widgets
Connect your blog or website with your Facebook Account using these powerful widgets.

Currently Online Readers Widget
A small widget which display how many users are currently online. The widget also indicates which pages are currently being looked at.

Contact Admin Widget
Let your users stay in touch with you with this contact form.

Post Ratings by Outbrain
Let your users give your post a star rating from one to five.

Social Bookmarking Widget
This widget lets your users to easily bookmark your blog posts at the bottom of each post.

PageRank Buttons
 Showoff your blog's Google PageRank with this small widget.

Google Talk Chat Back Badge
A Google Talk chatback badge will let visitors to your web page chat with you. They'll be able to chat with you whenever you're signed in to Google Talk.

Twitter Widget Tools
A great post containg 502 twitter widget tools, buttons, and icons for Engaging your followers.

PayPal Donation Button
If you've got a loyal reader community that might be willing to sponsor you as a blogger, this would be the way.

Google Buzz Share Button
Another way to share your content across a great social network.

Performancing Ads Widget
Another way to make some money from your blog by letting others advertise on your site.

Sudoku Puzzle Widget
Have some fun on your blog with this interactive sudoku game that will easily go in the sidebar.  The sudoku has five different levels of difficulty.

Yummy! Free Food and Cakes Icon Set

Today we are glad to release something extremely tasty — Yummy Icon Set, a set with 20 beautiful, original and sweet icons in resolutions 48×48px – 128×128px and formats .png, .ico, .incs and .tif. Also, the vector source (.eps) is available for free download as well. This set was designed by our friends Iconeden and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download the icon set for free!

You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word.

• download the set (incl. vector source) (.zip, 3.5 Mb)
• IconEden’s release post
  

Behind the design

As always, here are some insights from the designer himself:

Dear Smashing Magazine readers, Xmas is coming! And we’re as excited about it as you’re. However, our inspiration comes from the work that we’re crafting everyday. And so, to double the joy, Smashing Magazine and IconEden happily announce the immediate availability of “Yummy”, our new icon set which heavily focuses on, ahem, food!
And it’s all yours. Bake it into your projects, use it in your Xmas greetings, or simply imagine yourself enjoying it! Similar to previous collections, Yummy comes in vector and pixel formats and can be immediately built into your projects at no cost. And of course, we’d love to hear from you. Do let us know what you think about Yummy by either leaving us a comment.
IconEden, the crown jewel of Frexy Studio, provides premium icons for websites and interfaces. We love freebies too! That’s why we’ve regularly released free icons to the world to show you how grateful we’re for being able to do what we love to do.
– IconEden Team

Thank you very much, guys! We really appreciate your efforts.

Free Dark and Clean WordPress Theme: Designpile

In this post we are glad to release DesignPile WordPress Theme, a theme designed by Site 5 and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The theme comes with 3 color styles and a couple of jQuery-based goodies. It can be used for portfolios and blogs as well as corporate webAs usual, the theme is free to use in private and commerical projects.

Download the theme for free!

The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.

• live demo
• large preview (1.2 Mb)
• installation guide and documentation
• download the .zip-package (.zip, 0.9 Mb, includes instructions files and required plugins)
• download mirror for the .zip-package
• release on designers’ site

Features

Here are some of the features of the theme:

• Widget ready (footer and sidebar),
• Easy to setup, the Theme Options Page has 3 color styles,
• Custom homepage,
• Simple Post Thumbnails Plugin,
• 125×125 ads section with enable/disable option, using “WP125″ plugin,
• JQuery Lightbox,
• JQuery Forms,
• AJAX-based based contact form,
• Live form email validation,
• Theme Requirements: Wordpress 2.9.1+

Sidebar

Content, overview

“About the author”-section

Comments

Categories archive section

Thank you, Gabi Schiopu and the Site 5 design team! We appreciate your work and your good intentions!

45 Excellent Blog Designs

Designing a blog is easy. Whatever engine you are using and whatever style you prefer, you’ll always find a number of templates you can apply to your weblog in seconds. No styling is necessary, no playing with colors is needed and no mind jogging about content presentation is required. However, not every weblog should look like a typical blog. After all, not every blogger wants his or her site to look exactly like hundreds of other ones. In fact, there is a small bunch of creative, outstanding and individually designed from scratch blogs.

In this post we didn’t try to showcase some eye-candy (although sometimes eye-candy is indeed offered); the designs listed below were selected for their attention to small details. Pretty and colourful header-graphics doesn’t make a good blog. The blog needs a solid visual structure, a profound hierarchy of site elements; it also has to be able to build some kind of a bridge between the content and its presentation. To do this, you need to think about precision, minimalism and sound use of illustration. These criteria were the ones we’ve used to select the designs listed below. All these aspects make the designs we’ve selected look… well, not always beautiful, but outstanding, almost excellent in their own kind. Mostly it’s the idea the designers used to make the weblog as usable as possible – not the implementation of this idea – which we’ve been after.

Below you’ll find 45 excellent blog designs which impress with creative approaches and attention to details; hopefully you’ll find new ideas you can develop further in your own designs.

Notice that the screenshots we’ve provided may give you a wrong impression about the whole design of the sites; in doubt you should take a closer look at headers, footers, comment-areas, site structure and further site elements. Please also notice that you can click on screenshots to get to the sites from which the screenshots have been taken.

Weblogs powered by Django

Ryan Berg (Django)

Derek Featherstone (Django)

Jeff Croft (Django)

Andy Hume (Django)

 

Weblogs powered by ExpressionEngine

Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain (Expression Engine)
Whitespace in use. The categories and popular entries are listed at the top of the page, not in the sidebar as they usually are.

Veerle Pieters
An almost “classic”, well-known design, but still incredibly beautiful. Veerle makes use of a dark layout with quite colourful scheme. The result is impressive – and the position of site elements extremely well thought-out.

Emanuel Blagonic (Expression Engine Wordpress)

 

Weblogs powered by MovableType

Kevin Kornell (Movable Type)
A typical weblog doesn’t look like an illustrated magazine. Kevin Kornell’s blog does. This one makes use of an “oldie”-style.

Cameron Moll

Dave Shea (Movable Type)

Dan Cederholm (Movable Type)

 

Weblogs powered by Textpattern

Praegnanz.de (Textpattern)
A minimalistic approach with clean web-typography.

Hicksdesign (Textpattern)

Geniant (Textpattern)

 

Blogs powered by Wordpress

Circle Six (Wordpress)

Pedro Lamin (Wordpress)
Fresh and clean design, lacking almost everything – there is even no navigation in blog categories.

Design Disease (Wordpress)

Surfgarden (Wordpress)

Dan Rubin (Wordpress)

NorthxEast (Wordpress)

Larissa Meek (Wordpress)

Matt (Wordpress)
A Business-Design. Look at the information sections on the left side of the layout.

Agenturblog (Wordpress)

Ben Gillbanks (Wordpress)

Rik Catlow (Wordpress)

FreelanceSwitch (Wordpress)

John Boardley (Wordpress)

Shaun Inman (Wordpress custom PHP-Framework. Thanks, Shaun)

Mstefan.com (Wordpress)

Screenz (Wordpress)

Screencasting (Wordpress)

Blog.Critical (Wordpress)

Wan Zafran (Wordpress)

Viki (Wordpress)
Extensive use of visual elements prevails; it might be a nice idea, but the content should prevail.

Nick La (Wordpress)
Playful design with dozens of swirls, curves and artistic elements.

Laura Alter (Wordpress)

Markus Zeeh (Wordpress)
Playful flower-images and ornaments seem to be trends.

Sidney Collins (Wordpress)

Roman Leinwather (Wordpress)

Bottled Sky (Wordpress)
Probably not the most gorgeous layout ever made, but well-structured. The use of colors communicates the idea of the site.

Johanna Hallin (Wordpress)

Cabana (Wordpress)
Sometimes it is an interesting approach to use a “thin” layout, although it should rather be an exception.

Reflections (Wordpress)

 Further Weblogs

Abduzeedo (Drupal)
Stylish, readable and clean. The site doesn’t look like blog at all – at least at the first glance.

Jonathan Snook (CakePHP)