10 Things You Can Do With Jiglu Tags - #2. Get your widget the way you want it

So you've got the widget installed on your blog and it's happily tagged everything but it doesn't look quite right alongside the style of your blog. That's where our widget settings come in.

Log on to jiglu.com and there on your home page under 'My tagged sites' you'll find a 'Change how the widgets look' option. This is where you can decide what you want to appear in your widget and how it should be styled.

What goes in

First you can decide the kind of tags you want it to include - topics, people or events, which I talked about yesterday. There's also another option for a sort-of-tag, 'Show links', that we turn off by default. This keeps track of every link to other sites that you post to your blog - turn it on if you want people to be able to get a list in the widget. You might also notice that when those links appear on your pages we add a tooltip with the title of the page being linked to so people know what they're getting before they visit.

The Jiglu widget also looks through the text on your page and adds a link to the tags that you mention. That way visitors can explore further when they're reading a blog entry and find you talking about a particular topic that they want to know more about. It'll only do it once per paragraph and only for the <p>, <blockquote> and <li> elements in HTML. Don't want that? Turn off the 'Put links in the text' option.

Listing every tag on a page, particularly on your blog's home page, could make the widget rather long. Because of that we 'fold' the sections in the widget to make it smaller until a visitor decides they want to explore further. Normally it does this if there's more than 10 tags in total but you can choose the number or to have it always happen.

Fitting your blog's style

You can also choose the colours the widget uses so it fits in with the style of your blog. When you first tag a site it will have a black border, white background, dark blue headings and black links but the choice is up to you. If you're not using a light background on your blog then you may want to make the border the same colour as the background, but it's really up to you.

You can also choose how wide the widget is and whether it lists topics, people, events and links one after each other or side by side. And if you chose the 'Put links in the text' option then you can choose the colour of those links, which will have a dotted style so people know they're different from the usual ones. You can always overwrite that in your blog's stylesheets by setting a style for the 'jigluLink' class.

What about the overlay?

The overlay is what we call the layer that pops up inside your blog that lets you explore what you've written that mentions particular tags and the tags themselves. At the moment the style for this is fixed and you can't change it. However, that will be changing soon.

Coming up

Right now we're working on a new generation of the widget and overlay. We've had some good feedback from users since we launched Jiglu Tags in October and it's all gone into our pondering on how to improve it.

We can't tell you everything yet, but our biggest requirements were that it should be smarter about giving you the most relevant information and should allow you to style and brand everything to fit in with your site.

We're still extremely keen to have your feedback. What would you most like to see us improve in the widget? If you want to add your comments then log on and click the button to join this space on the blog home page. Alternatively we're always happy to hear from you at ....