Blogger has always been given step-motherly treatment while Wordpress gets all the attention. My experience with PC Geek on Blogger has helped me learn a lot about this platform and inevitably, I came across many plug-ins (known as widgets in blogger). In this post, I am going to provide you with a walk-through of 5 Widgets I think are worth using on your blog, some of the services I mention here are also available for Wordpress.
Disqus:
Disqus is a very popular Comment Management System for blogs and with Blogger having a substandard comment system, the third party comment management services have become more significant among bloggers. Disqus gives you the convenience of threaded comments and many other useful features such as commenting with your Twitter/Facebook/Yahoo profile. If you are looking for a good alternative to Disqus, you should consider Intense Debate.
ShareThis:
Sharing helps your blog to become all-the-more famous in the blogosphere and helping your readers share your posts easily will make sure that your readers share what they want to. ShareThis is an amazing service that helps you integrate Twitter and Facebook buttons with minimum fuss. If you are not well-versed with all the HTML codes to integrate these buttons to your blog, you might as well grab them from ShareThis. It is also available for WordPress users.
Floating Twitter Badge:
If your blog has a dedicated Twitter account, it makes sense to publicize the same to get more followers. Adding a Floating Twitter badge will help you accomplish that easily and GO2WEB20 has an amazing floating widget you should check out. The HTML code they offer should work on most of the blogging platforms around including Blogger.
Related Posts Widget:
Showing related posts to the reader at the end of every article has shown to bring in more hits to your site and many WordPress blogs have started using Related Posts plugins. Solid Blogger gives you an awesome Related Posts widget with a comprehensive tutorial of using the same on your blog.
FoxyForm:
Contact forms are one the most significant aspects of a website/blog. It’s very difficult to come across such services for free. FoxyForm and are two of my recommendations. FoxyForm is free whereas Formstack follows a freemium model. If you do not have special needs for your contact form, you can use FoxyForm, but, if you are looking for more than just a contact form Formstack might be the best bet. Remember, the free Formstack service takes the user to its website after the form is completed and this makes the user leave your site without his wish.
These are some of the services I have personally checked out and found to be very good, If you know anything else that’s worth mentioning, leave a comment below.
I was using fb share & like & tweet in both of my blog but recent change made a drop back and now i don’t have any social network tool on my blogs. But as share this tool looks quite impressive i am willing to put on my blogs.
Hey buddy… have a look at my blog now (personal one, not the magazine) … I added a Popular Posts widget and a Random Posts one too. Also changed the main page to show summary posts. Ahh but I’m still sticking to the old lighthouse template of blogger! He he :p Anyways next in my list is adding a contact form… so your 5th point in this list is going to help me out! 😀
I love disqus commenting system
Great list, Thanks for sharing..
I use Disqus and sharing for twitter, Facebook etc. For now it is enough for me, but I will try other widgets you suggest. 🙂
Nice lists…
thanks…….
Honestly the coolest of the widgets…Love them
I like Sharebar, it creates a floating bar with sharing buttons on your blog. A must-get for everyone!
I want to ask one question: The comments posted using discuss is shown in google cache or not? Thanks.
It will be shown I guess. 🙂
Its better to avoid related posts stuffs, it will eat cpu usage. 🙁 nice article.
Related posts widgets does NOT eat CPU usage. It’s just an object on your blog and It’s not even a flash component.
Really cool widgets for blogger, specially Disqus is great and I was not aware that it is available for blogger also. Commenting will be easy with Disqus. I am going to use it.
nice post Gouthaman
All of them are really great… I have used 3 of them and they are awesome… will try the next 2
Thanks, Gouthaman. Very informative post… I will adapt them for my blogs…
You guys should try Foxyform, It is an amazing service.
some of them new to me , will try on my blogger blog .
I am liking the foxy form … let’s see how it fits on my blog… Thanks for sharing …
thanks goutham i tried all 🙂 but didn’t tried foxyform thanks for share and info