Giant forms are ridiculous and funny, so I made the polar opposite of a teeny cute little widget for the desktop (though it’s a spiritual sister to the widget’s iPhone adaptation).

One thing to consider these days with web pages like this—or like slide shows—is the emergence of netbooks and their screen rez specs, usually 1024 by 600. That’s a very wide, short canvas. It’s an awkward shape if you want users to be able to see everything on the screen at the same time. In this case I half ignored it.

I don’t like to think about having to compensate for this; the aspect ratio battles with aesthetic comfort. I think I’ve read that it’s built right into our DNA to prefer something more like 4:3 or 3:2. 

It took almost a year for my Obama inauguration countdown widget to reach a thousand users on iGoogle (and Blogger) and also just over 1,000 on Facebook.

In 10 days on Clearspring the widget is at 397 installs.

Update: Then, 2,500 all in one day at day 17.  I’m still trying to figure out what triggered that. Let me know if you’ve seen it publicized or featured in a gallery.

It’s just one datapoint, but if anybody asks me I’d definitely have to recommend listing widgets on Clearspring.

My “Search this” widget? Not so promising. It’s been on Clearspring for 9 days and sits at a pitiful 13 installs. I attribute the difference to 1) fondness for Obama and a desire to show it 2) the popularity of countdowns—it’s become a standard genre in widgetry while a search box as widget isn’t like anything people are familiar with.

The search widget also takes some daily maintenance to keep the searches current. The time sink, along with the widget’s sad wallflower stature right out of the box, makes me start thinking about abandoning it. But not just yet. Ideas that don’t catch on might be stupid ideas, but sometimes they’re just not understood. I’m still having fun with it, and I’m learning something, which is valuable to me: I’m doing some experimentation with tricky Expression Engine templates in templates, which I’m thinking of writing up as a tutorial. 

Send yourself this link for an iPhone-optimized version of the ”Search this” widget. It’s a pretty good time waster.

Not yet tested on any other mobile. Let me know if you’ve tried it on another device.

Note to other beginners in iPhone page making: I experimented with viewport widths after realizing that in this case it was not a matter of setting it at 320 to shrink a big page. In the end I settled on 185, which makes sense; that’s the optimum width for this widget’s sidebar version on a regular monitor. 

In fact, I don’t want to retire it, so I started doodling with a days-in-office widget to replace it.

This is just a comp. Ideas are welcome.

I suppose, if things started to get rough for the new administration, the pencil points could wear down and break, and as time goes on some of the pencils would grow shorter.

Update: Things look different on a new day and now this looks to me like an ad. What is the aesthetic difference between a widget and an ad, anyway? It’s not a question of looking too slick, because many widgets are very smooth. Maybe in this case it’s the stock photo. Stock photos are great but they always make me feel like I’m being hustled, especially when they include smiling models. 

It’s a series of rotating, topical, pre-coded searches that reveal random news and crowd pulse discovery, or a laugh. Topics include politics, tech, and the passing scene for now, and they are all mixed into the rotation.

Once the archive has built up a little more, I might categorize them so you can see just one category or all of them. See the archives for a look at the searches that will appear in your widget.

The widget is a functioning form, so users can enter their own search terms and results from the same service (i.e. Twitter, Google blogs, Yahoo news) will be returned.

Easter egg: click on “Search this” to reload the widget and try a different search.

Write a comment to: suggest a new search or new category of searches; remind me if a search isn’t timely anymore; or to ask for help or customizations.