One way to increase traffic to a site is by giving away code that people will want to add to their websites. This code would then create a link back to my site. I thought I would call my code widgets. Examples of this kind of code are: hit counters, weather widgets, world clock, stock tickers etc.

My first idea was to provide lottery number results widgets. I actually went ahead an coded some and added them to this site. But then I realized that they would eat my bandwidth once a few sites started using them. This was because the widget is a dynamically updated image. So I have to host the image on my site and let people hot-link to it.

It’s an image showing numbers because if it was a list of numbers in html then these numbers would be too easy for content scrapers to access. I don’t want my site to be a source of data for other people’s data mining scripts.

The problem with hot-linking is that every time there is a hit on the external web page, there is also a hit on my image. So if there are 100 sites linking to the image. There are 100 times the hits to the image. So a small 10KB file now looks like 1MB. As even more sites link to the image, the bandwidth hit can become scary.

So it dawned on me that it is a really bad idea to encourage hot-linking to content. The best approach is to let people cut and paste code to their site with no hot-links only a web site link.

There is one way to serve these images that is not a big problem for bandwidth, it’s to allow sites to periodically grab the updated image e.g. once per week. But this would only be possible by web masters with enough knowledge and access rights to set up the script and file permissions on their server.

So soon after making these widgets live I deleted them. Now I have a widgets section with no widgets!

Hmm, so what kind of widgets am I going to provide now?

Good question, I think they will be like code snippets but combined with CSS styling to create customizable, colorful text output.

Simple ones that spring to mind are: visitor’s IP address display, time and date display and random sentence picker.

Stay tuned…