Is Your WordPress Blog Missing Some Text Widget Love?

Do you like to play with widgets? You know, those little buggers that do so many things for your WordPress blog?

If you are on WordPress.com, you get a certain number of widgets to work with. If you are self-hosted, the sky’s the limit—and be forewarned: there are thousands of them out there.

In fact, sometimes it feels like there is a widget for just about anything.

Here’s one that is particularly useful It’s called the text widget. It comes as a default widget in WordPress. You may have already discovered it.

Or not.

Underneath this widget in your widget page, it simply says, “Arbitrary text or HTML.”

Looks promising. But when you type some text, it’s not as exciting as you thought. You might get excited. You think, wow I can simply type some text in there. In fact, it looks bland.

And when you see “HTML,” you might  shiver. You don’t know HTML—and never will. It’s scary stuff.

So you ignore it.

But give it a closer look. because this little widget could become your best friend. In fact, in my workshops I used to refer to it as the “magical text widget” until people started googling “magical text widget”. Learned my lesson there.

What can you do with the text widget?

Let’s say you have been listed as one of the Top 10 Food Blogs and you want to put the badge on your sidebar. They send you an email and give you a few lines of code—or HTML—for that and the shivers start again.

What the heck am I supposed to do with that, you say.

Look no further than your text widget friend. Simply drag it over into your sidebar, give it a title (if you want), then paste that hieroglyphics-like  code into it.

Presto! Your badge shows up.

And here’s let a little tip for with you on how to create your own sidebar badge—even if you don’t know HTML.

An example: Let’s say I want to put the “For Bloggers By Bloggers” badge on my sidebar. They sent me the graphic, but now what?

1) I save it on my computer.

2) I open up a new page. I  won’t be saving this, just using it to format my own badge with its own link.

3) I click on the upload media button and find the graphic I just saved. A window like this will come up. See the arrows? That’s where I linked the image to the blog’s URL and centered it.

4) Once i have the image in, I can add some text below it. My page edit window will look like this:

5) I click on the HTML tab and copy the code.

6) I go back to my widgets. I grab the text widget, drag it into my sidebar, open it and paste the code in. You can also add a title for the widget if you want to:

7) I’ll save and then I can preview my new badge in the sidebar of my blog.

This widget can also be used when grabbing code for your Facebook “like” box or Twitter feed. The options are practically endless.

Just remember, it’s the “text” widget, not the “magical text” widget.

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• When Widget Love Becomes an Obsession
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