Dreamwidth: The Nifty Things You Might Not Know

After I added a LibraryThing widget to my own DW blog, I got some requests to share the technique in this group. Finally, I'm getting around to writing something up.

The first widget developed at LibraryThing for posting on blogs was written in JavaScript. But Dreamwidth, like its parent site LiveJournal, doesn't allow for inclusion of such script-based widgets on its journals. (If this is no longer a limitation, I hope someone in the know will correct me.) Sooo, a clever person over at LT developed an image-based widget that lives just fine on LJ-style sites.

The LT blog post describing how to use the widget: Graphical Widgets for LJ and etc..

While detailed, the above blog post might still be confusing for folks not very familiar with HTML or especially argument strings on URLs. So I'll provide a detailed breakdown of the options I used to produce my own widget (seen at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar of my journal).