By Mina Sorvese

Widgets are gaining popularity because they make things more easily accessible.  Widgets are little applications like the weather, games, and feeds for things like news and other things that can be added to different programs, or your desktop.  If added to your email signature, people who you email can use those applications.  I will teach you how to apply widgets to your email signature.      

First thing you must do is decide which ones you want.  To do this you can search for them or you can use widget creating programs online and make your own.  Yahoo Widgets will allow you to get widgets that were created by other user, or create your own.      

The next thing you must do is to get the code for the widget.  To do this you must download the widget or widgets of your choice.  After you have finished downloading you will see the option “Get Widget Code.”  You must highlight and copy all the text for the code.  You must remember to copy the text for the code, because if you leave out even a little colon or back slash you will not get the widget you want.      

Now you must open your email.  Remember that your email must be able to run Flash and Java applications, or the widget will not work.  If your computer does not run these programs, it will usually redirect you to a page where you can download them.  If this does not happen you can simply search for then to download on to your computer.  You will then go into the options menu.  Once you have done that go to the signature tab.  Once you have done this a blank page will open, when it does paste the code on it.  Then you just click submit or save or whatever you email says. 

You might want to send out a test message to make sure the widget is on your signature.  In the event the widget does not show up, try pasting the code again, and sending another message.  If the widget is still not showing up on the signature you will want to start the process all the way over again.  Make sure you get the whole code to copy that is usually the problem when it does not work.       

Widgets are a really cool thing to add to websites, emails, other programs, and the desktop on your computer.  Really the hardest part of the process is to find the ones you want, once you do that it is pretty self explanatory from there.   You will see it is really easy to do.  I hope I made these directions easy enough to understand, and good luck, I hope it works out.