Feedonomics

Quiltcetera is a free quilting tutorial and pattern site. Bradie Sparrow, known as quiltcetera at Grazr.com, says she has loved Grazr widgets ever since her husband recommended them as a way to make answering quilting questions easier.

“I keep close track of the most frequently asked questions and often blog about them or make a video and upload it to Youtube,” Sparrow says. “I have used these formats in the past to send new quilters to find answers. I was finding it quite time consuming to keep blogging every time I got a question and found my blog crowded with outbound links. I asked my husband to find me something I could use to better organize my lists of feeds and links. He came back to me a day later with a huge smile on his face, promising that he had just found a site that would more than solve all my problems.”

Sparrow says she’s found Grazr widgets to be even better than claimed. She uses the widgets to compile lists of links to products people ask about often. ”I receive a few e-mails every day particularly about long arm quilting machines, so I built a grazr (grazr.com/read/quiltcetera/c432e0f1) to show new quilters which Long arm quilting machines I recommend. I load this grazr’s widget into my site and any time I
modify the list in my grazr account the widget on my blog will be immediately updated. I can load this widget into as many site as I like and they will all update automatically.”

Live eBay feeds make great Grazrs for quiltcetera as well. “What’s best about these Grazrs is that I can run the live widget and visitors can search eBay live feeds without leaving my site.” Here is an example of a Grazr Sparrow uses for Long Arm Quilting Machines for sale on eBay: grazr.com/read/quiltcetera/c276e361.”

Sparrow say she’d love to see an interactive community surrounding Grazr.com. “This would allow users to
rate other [widgets] and more importantly, comment on them as well as recommend other links to the creator of the original list.”

Must be something about Grazr widgets that attracts people who find learning important, because we have more education Grazrs to share with you. Great minds think alike, and Grazr-makers think minds are worth making great.

conchocon wins for the best widget we’ve seen in a while. It’s a collection of feeds to help you learn English, plus reading lists from tech sites, popular podcasts  and video, and a couple of Google search boxes to boot. “Learn English” is so useful, you’ll want a copy for yourself, even if you already know how to speak the language.

Our next widget is a classic reading list, filled with dozens of feeds from education journals. Who knew? conflictlearning knew, and now you do too.

pratico contributed a widget containing feeds from education related blogs written in Italian. Take a look.

Grazr widgets seem to be popular with builders and sellers of buildings, as evidenced by this week’s collection of three widgets from the construction and real estate industry.

Charles McDonald sells real estate in Charlottesville, Virginia, and keeps a blog promoting his services at ActiveRain. To keep visitors to the site abreast of the latest real estate information in Charlottesville, he placed a widget in the sidebar.

Grazr user markgalloway had a great idea for a Grazr widget. He keeps up with owner-financed properties for sale, like timeshares, homes, and land, on eBay by subscribing to a search feed.

And finally,  BuildBible.com has posts and a discussion forum on a wide range of construction related topics. User buildbible constructed a Grazr to keep track of those topics, all the way from air purifiers to safety equipment for your pool. Building a house? You might want to get your own copy of this Grazr widget.

The Internet has become the delivery medium of choice for vast numbers of music lovers. So it only makes sense that Grazrs would be a useful part of the mix of melody and technology. Several of our past featured widgets focus on music; here are three particularly interesting selections.

Debbie’s got some blogs, and she has a message for you: ovarian cancer is bad, and music is good. You’ll see what I mean after you take a look at the feeds in this widget. If you’re a music-loving cancer hater (and who isn’t), you’ll want your own copy of this Grazr.

At the Ribaldry and Schmaltz blog, J Shifty is the MC of all things Rhapsody. He manages to find and discuss all kinds of oddball playlists and new releases. Tucked in the right sidebar is a Grazr of his ribald Rhapsody playlist. Give it a listen.

And finally for this week, they call it Pandoralicious. It’s a collection of station feeds from the popular custom Internet radio site Pandora.com, and it’s a great way to browse for new music.

The Internet provides a rich resource of material to learn from, no matter what you’re looking to learn. This week, we’re highlighting some recent Grazrs that have focused on education. With a collection like this, someone is bound to learn something, and that’s a good thing.

First up is the Cumbria Learning Grid. Cumbria County, a rural shire in northwest England, promotes better education and child services through its site, the Cumbria Grid for Learning. To help site visitors stay abreast of education news in the UK, there are two Grazr widgets: one for education news from the BBC, and one that links to The Guardian.

Next is MIT’s OpenCourseWare. psychemedia posted a collection of feeds for MIT’s OCW (open courseware) learning information for advanced high school students. There are offerings in biology, calculus, and physics.

My personal favorite, the Triangle Grammar Guide becomes Grazr fodder at sirmirom’s blog. Pick this one up, and you too can know the meaning of “gobsmack.”

Just last week, we learned there is actually now a green Grazr. This widget highlights the “eco-lifestyle” of a college girl. The GreenStudentU Grazr gathers feeds from GreenStudentU.com, a blog that “introduces today’s students to a wide variety of global environmental issues by recognizing on-campus green initiatives and personal success stories, as well as how the world is being shaped by political environmental reform.”

And finally this week, jameskm03 made a great Grazr that collects the blog feed authored by Wofford College’s webmaster, Kyle James. Kyle’s blog is all about Internet marketing and Web development, from a higher education perspective. Take a look at some of the posts - you may find this Grazr worthy of a spot on your own site.

Librarians are not just book geeks, they’re reading geeks, so Grazr reading lists are a natural fit. That’s why librarian and library-related widgets have been featured fairly often as the Grazr widget of the day. Here are four recent selections worth another look.

Library Sharings hosts a widget that gathers all the best online information about Africa and puts it together with research tools that provide everything you’d need to write a thesis.

The “Lo-fi Librarian” loves law, libraries, and technology. To keep up with all three, she keeps a Grazr reading list of dozens of feeds from sites like Slashdot, Library Journal News, and Legal Week.

And finally, The Waidner-Spahr library at Dicksinson College in Carlisle, PA, uses a Grazr widget to keep visitors to the main library page in tune with the latest library news, including newsletter announcements, technology advances, and Waidner-Spahr events and outings.

Politics seems to be a fairly common motivator for making widgets, which isn’t really a surprise given American is currently embroiled in a political struggle for the White House. This week our Grazr collection consists of four political widgets.

The Giant Political Mouse blog, written by a Canadian, takes a look at North American politics, and keeps track of other political sites with its Grazr widget.

Next is “US Foreign Policy,” which seems to be a popular candidate for copying. socejubb and iisjgr both like it, but we’re not sure who the original author is.

And finally, the paranoid crowd gets widget-prolific with two conspiracy-theory inspired widgets. Grazr user marios posts a conspiracy theory with a twist: Youtube feeds for videos that attempt to prove a link between the elder President Bush, President Clinton, and Mena.

One of the most consistently popular widgets at Grazr.com is an archive of podcasts by Dr. Sam Kennedy, a regular at RepublicBroadcasting.org.