Gadget, Widget -- Gidget!

A FEW DAYS AGO, I was looking for something new to blog about here and called on our founder and driving force, Rusty, to ask him if he was working on anything new and exciting for uscity.net. Well, yes. Yes he was. He told me he was in the process of creating some gadgets. I, of course, immediately thought he had an idea for a new can opener or a better mousetrap. And knowing Rusty, as I do, that would be entirely possible!

However, Rusty assured me that he was working on something to help out uscity.net’s partners and anyone who would like to have easy access to our home page and some of our special features. We will be adding these gadgets to our site. Still, I thought, :HUH?!?,.

He started explaining it to me, got into explaining codes and proprietary stuff and I was lost, so I decided to do some research to find out about these new gadgets for websites. One of the first things I came across was an article stating that gadgets are actually widgets (again, HUH?!?) that are not widgets.

I went to one of my favorite sites, dictionary.com to get some definitions. So now I know that a Widget is:

“1. A meta-thing. Used to stand for a real object in didactic examples (especially database tutorials). Legend has it that the original widgets were holders for buggy whips. "But suppose the parts list for a widget has 52 entries..."
2. [possibly evoking "window gadget"] In graphical user interfaces, a combination of a graphic symbol and some program code to perform a specific function. E.g. a scroll-bar or button. Windowing systems usually provide widget libraries containing commonly used widgets drawn in a certain style and with consistent behaviour.”

Well, that certainly clears it all up… NOT!

And, I could not find anything for a computer related gadget on the site, but now know that the synonyms for gadget are: “contraption; whatsis, doohickey, thingamajig.”

But I prevailed and let me share with you what I found:

A gadget or widget is like a mini-program installed on your website to give you easy access to things you use a lot. It is so cool that we can now have the information we use the most right on our homepage. What I have gathered from my readings is that both widgets and gadgets do the same things. One article says that a widget can be plugged into anyone’s website with the proper code and that gadgets can only be plugged into certain websites or groups of websites. Then there’s Google, who I assume is way ahead of most of us on the top trends in websites and programming. They call their applications, which are mobile, gadgets So if we wanted to add a gadget to uscity.net, we could add it to all fifty states… florida.uscity.net, texas.uscity.net, california.uscity.net, etc…And if we want to make the same sort of applications for other websites to use to get to our features, we can do that too – (of course, when I say we, I mean the programmers).

For instance, if your website visitors are interested in up to date, real-time weather conditions and forecasts, you can install one of these cool little applications and your website visitors can instantly go to our weather site to check the weather, news or find a hotel. You could help your visitors find goods and services by putting our uscity.net main page gadget/widget on your website. The possibilities are endless. Rusty could make us some gadgets AND widgets to check out traffic information, news, use translation tools and even games and calculators.

I have read too many articles and websites that disagree on the meaning and/or difference of widgets and gadgets and it is getting late, so my final thought is that uscity.net should make our features mobile, easy to install on any website, forget about widgets and gadgets and create USCITY.NET GIDGETS!!

Gidgets… Gadgets… Widgets… whatever they are called, are awesome tools for us to use – I hope we can reach out to our communities with local news and weather, movie times in Florida, traffic information and more. Go Rusty Go!