Bloggers are often asked, “Why do you blog?” It’s usually to express yourself, to share your views, to create a space that tells visitors about you. There are more ways than blog posts to do that. You can make your blog an even cooler and fun corner of the Web by adding free content that gets updated automatically.


Most of this content is in the form of widgets — small programs that give information or other content updated in real-time. They work on most blog sites, such as Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, and so on, and even with social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Getting these onto your site is, in most cases, a matter of clicking a few buttons or a simple copy-paste operation. So, without further ado, here are some things that might look good on your blog.


Monitor blog traffic

There are innumerable counters that let you count the number of visitors to your blog. A more interesting way to do this is to find out which part of the world your visitors come from. At www.clustrmaps.com, you can download a world-map widget for this. This represents visitors as dots on the map. You can see up to 100 visitors on the small map, and up to 1,000 when you zoom into it.


You can download a similar world map from www.feedjit.com. This site also has a widget called Live Traffic Feed. This helps you to see which city or country your visitors came from, which website they visited before yours, what part of your blog they visited, and the external link they clicked to move out.


Share content

Want your visitors to bookmark your blog to Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Stumble Upon, or share it on their profiles in Facebook? Download a button for this at http://sharethis.com. Using this button, your visitors can share your blog posts with any of the popular bookmarking and social-networking sites. A similar bookmarking widget is available at www.addthis.com.


Tickle the funny bone

You can now put your favorite jokes or comic strips on your blog. If Dilbert is your daily dose of laughter, go to http://widget.dilbert.com. For those with a more abstract and darker sense of humor, www.gapingvoid.com offers cartoons that are updated daily. At www.widgetbox.com, you can download Giglish, which features jokes/video clips from Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Show with David Letterman, and Late Night with Conan O’Brien. This site also has other cartoon and comic strips that you can add if they appeal to you.


Clocks and calendars

If organization and time management are an important part of you, you might like to add a clock or a calendar to your blog. Two simple calendars are available at www.getcalendarwidget.com. You can find a range of analog and digital clocks in various designs, as well as more calendars, at http://widgets.yahoo.com and www.widgetbox.com.


Pictures et al

If you like glitter and bling, a few animated GIF images, video clips, avatars, clipart and other glitter stuff may be the order of the day. You can download all of this at www.glitter-graphics.com.


Share your tastes in music

If you have an iTunes account, you can get the My iTunes widget. This will help you share your recent purchases at iTunes, your top-rated reviews, and your favorite music artists. Head to www.apple.com/itunes/myitunes to get an iTunes account and a widget.


These are only a few of the things that you can add to your blog to make it more interesting and happening. There’s a whole world of widgets on the Web for you to explore. So, go on and have fun!