Object of the Week Widget

I wrote a somewhat sanctimonious and snarky series of emails to the editor of our local paper last night after registering on their web site and discovering that I had been asked to provide my age, address, real name and myriad other details for the right to leave moderated comments on the editors blog. (You can't even comment on news stories!)

He probably concluded that I was a complete nutcase. In any case, I didn't hear back from him. I did leave him with at least one actionable piece of advice:

Create a widget that folks can put on their blogs, facebook pages, etc that displays a thumbnail of the front page and links to the corresponding day's web page when you click on it. This would be very easy to implement and would draw people to your site."

This afternoon, I thought that I would just go ahead and implement the widget for him to show how easy it was. Then it occurred to me that my time would be better spent following my own advice and building one for Open Museum. So here is my first shot at a widget. This one displays the current Open Museum Object of the Week and links to the corresponding object page when you click on it.

Here's the embed code if you want to try it on your own blog:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.openmuseum.org/widget/ootw"></script>

Let me know if you have any problems.