Feedjit is a service that provides live traffic feed for your site. It is easy to set up – you copy chunk of HTML and insert it into your blog’s markup. That is, if you know HTML and used to editing files in your blog, which shouldn’t be a requirement for average blogger. This is why popular blog providers supply Feedjit widgets – so that blogger does not have to edit files by hand and FTP them to the host. In this little exercise we create such a widget for BlogEngine. More...

When working with Widgets framework in upcoming BlogEngine 1.4, you have three choices for saving widget settings to data store: StringDictionary, XmlDocument and CustomObject. StringDictionary is really a simple one and will fit your needs in a lot (if not most) cases. XmlDocument provides more flexible data storage excellent for complex hierarchical data structures, but it might be a daunting task to handle. You might look at LinkList that comes with standard install on example of using XmlDocument. Custom object provides you with familiar way of working with complex data, but it has it's own gotchas. I'll try to address some of them here. More...