Arbor Day is the day when everyone is supposed to go out and plant a tree. To celebrate this day and to help remind everyone that in this digital age we still need to save time to go outdoors and enjoy nature, we have built you an Arbor Day "widget-tree."

Just "plant" the tree on your profile, blog or desktop like you would any of our widgets and watch it grow over time. The longer the tree remains, the bigger it grows.

Our tree has a 30 day growth period before it reaches maturity and occasionally, if you are lucky, you'll see one of the many woodland creatures that like to play on or around trees show up for a visit.

A little bit about Arbor Day:
Arbor Day was suggested on January 4, 1872 so that farmers in Nebraska would have better wind breaks, building material and a more pleasant landscape than the tree-less plains they found when they arrived.

Since that time it has evolved and has spread around the world. Today, planting trees is more important than ever, since they act like a filter and improve the quality of our air, protect our water, save energy, and improve the overall wellbeing of people who live and work nearby.

I remember planting my first real life Arbor Day tree when I was in grade school. That tree still stands today and provides shade for a whole new generation of kids eating lunch and playing games right where I used to. The effects of that one action have brought joy to thousands over the years and is, in hindsight, probably the best thing that I have ever been involved in.

Remember, "planting" our widget is not a substitution for planting a real tree or enjoying nature, so you should still run out to your local arborist and grab a small tree to plant so that you can use this day to give something to the future. Happy Planting!

-Don

A complete history of Arbor Day can be found here.

Tips for planting trees can be found here.

Labels: arbor day, green, releases, widget

As anyone following the site can see, we've put a few new widgets in the gallery since last week.

We've added widgets from the NBC Show Heroes, Harper Collins Booksellers, American Idol, Rotten Tomatoes, Ask Men, Fox Sports, Career One, 20th Century Fox, FX, Speed Channel, News.com.au, and about a couple hundred of your own customized ExpressWidgets!

Heroes

How cool is it that SpringWidgets is driving the viral widget on the official Heroes MySpace page! I don't know if you are a fan, but here at SpringWidgets, we are all fans of Heroes and this is one of the only shows that we refuse to miss!

Look through our gallery and you might also discover a Heroes feed in an ExpressWidget or two!

Harper Collins
Take a look at the upcoming books section of Harper Collins Booksellers. Every upcoming book they offer will sport a widget that you can take with you to count down to the release of your favorite upcoming book.

ExpressWidgets in the house!
Even though it's only been a week since we had our soft launch of the ExpressWidgets beta, we're being bombarded with new widgets. My guess is that even with the tens of thousands of SpringWidgets RSS Readers that were created before we introduced the new process, we'll see this gallery grow rapidly.

For those of you who were brave enough to jump on board right away and found a thing or two that you would like changed about the express widgets process, we've been listening! We've upgraded the profiles so that they now show the widgets that you have "expressed" and we've also built in an "edit" and a "delete" feature for your widget in case you have a change of heart after you've published.

Simply log in using the button on the upper right of this page to view and edit the widgets that you have in our system - you can change the default size, header image, gallery tile and color of the widget using your edit page.

American Idol chose to have our technology drive a few bobbling heads made especially for their contestants. Now you too can put a Sanjaya Bobbler on your blog. Check out their site for more information

If you have a few minutes, take a stroll through our gallery and take a look at the variety of creative and colorful solutions that have been added. Chances are that you'll find quite a few that you can add to your page or blog.

This has been a busy couple of weeks here, and we have pushed out quite a few new widgets and features. We're hard at work on some other stuff too that quite honestly blows the doors off any other widget platform out there, bar none. But more on that later . . .

Labels: harper collins, heroes, releases, widgets

It’s a day to “Express” change . . .

Today we’ve launched our ExpressWidgets service…

http://springwidgets.com/express/getFeed/

Up until now you could use our RSS Reader Widget to brand and add a blog to your site or desktop, but you could not add that finished blog widget to our gallery so that other people could find it and share it.

Today we changed all that!!!

As of right now you can use our ExpressWidgets process to create your own uniquely-branded Widget(s) and have those widgets instantly added to our gallery just like any other widget. Build as many as you want and add them to our growing gallery of blogs and desktop Widgets so other users can embed, pass along and bring them to the desktop.

It’s pretty cool. We “expressed” the RSS Reader first. We think it’s the easiest build process for you to quickly syndicate and distribute your blog or audio and video podcast content. Best of all, you can uniquely brand your ExpressWidget to match your website or blog, making it a truly one-of-a-kind Widget out in the WidgetSphere.

To make sure that the end product is as good as it can be, we've added a new way to customize an Express RSS Reader - you can now skin the "chrome" around the content so that it better matches your blog or site. (This is a feature that has been requested for a while and we are happy to be able to push this feature live today).

And for our many Feedburner users, your burned feeds will continue to give you the industry leading analytics and metrics for which Feedburner is known. If you have your Feedburner feed handy, drop on in to the ExpressWidgets process now and add your blog to our gallery to get some free exposure.

Talking about exposure… We’ve also added in a few familiar buttons on the display pages for your widget. Anyone can now Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us and otherwise bookmark your widget directly from the widget view in the gallery – guaranteed to lead to at least a couple of hundred eyeballs on your content ;-)

Go get’em tiger!

Labels: express, releases, widget