Anyone following the changelog (or our recent tweets, sign up as a follower to get the latest scoop!) has noticed that the first aspect of our plan for July is to smooth and polish the Bonanzle widget collection.  Yesterday's update included all of the following:

• Added popup details about widget items when moused over
• Added ability to page through widgets with more than the previous max (14) items
• Added new interface to quickly add or remove items from widget en mass
• Added ability to add commentary to individual widget items (mouse over the swimsuit on my nerd blog)
• Numerous UI improvements, including side-by-side display for creating widgets, one-click button to copy widget, and status indicator to show where you are in widget creation process.
• Widgets automatically size themselves to correct height (instead of requiring you to guess it)
• Added ability to paste widgets without use of Javascript (should help putting widgets on social networking sites and the like)
• Added SEO juice to the link location for your widget
  

But that was just the warmup round.  Today, we're releasing in beta form a new generation of widget:  the Bonanzle search widget.  It's two million items in a box -- ready-made for your blog, web site, or social networking profile of choice.  The search widget can be used to either search all of Bonanzle's inventory, or just the inventory of your booth.  It can be setup to display the results of a given search term by default, or to show custom-picked items by default.  And it still comes with almost all of the perks of the standard widget (with one exception:  you can't choose the order of the default items shown at this point).

In the near future, we'll also hoping to add yet another new widget... more details on that when it gets closer to being available.

How do I set mine up?

Easy peasy!  My Bonanzle -> Manage Widgets (it's on the left side of the page, under Make More Sales).  From there you can create or edit widgets.  If you choose to create a new widget, then click Create widget from scratch, you'll be given the choice to create either a standard widget or search widget.  It should be pretty self-explanatory when you try it.

Why widgets?

And so you may wonder:  what's the big deal with widgets?

There are two big deals.  The first, more immediate, reason, is that widgets are the perfect way to expose Bonanzle in a helpful way to the friends and family that visit your blog, web site, or social networking profile.  Not only that, but since the widget links back to whatever address you chose, Google will give more credibility to the items in your booth when you paste a widget in your blog or get friends and family to post your widget in their web locations, the more visited the site, the more credibility your booth gets when the widget is posted there.

The second reason is that by the end of this month, the Bonanzle Affiliates Program is going to be unveiled.  Widgets will be the glue that attaches affiliate blogs and sites back to Bonanzle, so we need them to be fully featured in order to put our best foot forward amongst potential affiliates.

A question for the social networkers

We'd love to accumulate some anecdotes from those that have successfully posted their widget to social networking sites like Livejournal, Ning, Facebook, and etc. We're hoping to add detailed instructions for these in the near future, and having a guide who has already successfully accomplished this would be tremendously appreciated.  If you have done this successfully, please let us know in the comments below and we'll be in touch soon.