WoW Blog Widgets

If you're ever in the market to make your own WoW Blog there are a couple of World of Warcraft oriented widgets you might want to consider adding to your site. Admittedly I have probably gone a little overboard with a few but as an html newb it's fun to experiment.

Here are some that I've found:

Thottbot Search Box. Begin a search of Thottbot from your site.

WoW Break's News feed. I removed this one when we hadn't had any news for a while but I still keep it on my private homepage.

At Tales of a WoW Addict I saw a new widget I just added for WoWHead.

Your del.icio.us tagrolls (You can see several of these down the sidebars of the home page - Links for WoW Enchanting, WoW Fishing, etc..)

Or Your del.icio.us Link Cloud which I don't use on this site but on my private homepage

Blizzard used to have a download kit for Fan Sites on the worldofwarcraft.com page but for the life of me I can't find it again. I was able to find a mirror for it here. This is where I got the disclaimer language I have at the bottom of this blog's homepage. The wow-europe site, however, still has an easy to find link to their fan-site program which interestingly listed a requirement I had never seen before - being updated at least weekly.

Search-WoW is a website I was just shown where you can search several websites at once for WoW information - They have a widget you can add as well.

Adsense - Although not a World of Warcraft oriented item, it does have a special relationship with a World of Warcraft blog. Because any WoW Blogger who puts up adsense will have to contend with Gold Selling ads because Adsense reads the words on your site and matches it to Advertisers who pay to advertise on sites with those words. Apparently gold-sellers are the only advertisers who know anything about WoW.



There are several ways to handle this issue:

• Go nogold and don't list any gold selling services on your site
• Embrace the gold selling, put that Adsense on there and let the pennies-per-click roll in.
• Adventures with Play addresses the issue with a disclaimer at the end of each post (click the link and scroll down for an example) addressed to the great Google-bots and asks for relevant ads for computers or such.
• wowwiki and wowinsider blacklist gold sellers but I wonder how possible it would be to keep up without a team of people on it.

Others:
I know there are more out there, for example, Frostbolt uses an Allakhazam tool to give mouse over information for loot he's picked up. Definitely a worthwhile blog tool.

For Non-Bloggers:

Thottbot has some Plugins for anyone to add to their browser:
(linked via Thottbot's Home Page under "Misc" "Plugins" - includes plugins to Firefox and Internet Explorer v. 7.

Wowhead also has Plugins.

Blizzard also has some Downloads including a Desktop theme designed for Windows XP.

Update 10/3/2007:
Also consider widgets from WoWBlues