A widget is some what like a blog plugin, and I think most would say, its considered a standard implementation applied to a blog any more, mostly to arrange your sidebars in a simpler way.

They allow you to easily add such things as Categories, Archives, Recent Posts, and Recent Comments and of course various monetization methods, without having to do a days worth of coding, “But all may not be as it appears in widget land”.

Hiding behind the code

As with most things good, it seem there is always someone or something that will try to change or implement it in a unethical or sneaky way. Usually to game the system or scam the public for the sole purpose of profit.

Since websites, blog, videos, graphics, pretty much everything on the internet follows some kind of coding, it is the perfect way to sneak in some “not so nice of things” and because of that the little widget I have now had to…

Label with a warning

Ok I am by no means a pro blog designer (websites are built/designed a little differently) so I am always checking out the different plugins and widgets to help me put my blogs together they’re awesome. What I found the other day though has made me take a much closer look at them before they go on my blogs.

While at wordpress I came across this post that I thought I should pass on for those of you that may not have seen or heard of this sneaky widget yet.

The widget is called “Amazon showcase” (It is not made by amazon either) and as of this writing the code has not been changed. Heres what you will find

Note: the author states that the widget will insert their ID 10% of the time. but feel free to disable it. “But they state it in the code”

Unless you make a habit of proofing your chosen widget code, or worst yet you don’t even no how to open a php file to see the code, then you won’t even know about this.

Here’s the part that makes it happen:

A commenter on the post I mention above offers this solution

[I just set the code to "(rand(1, 10) == 0)". This should never select the author's ID.]

Or you could just disable or delete it

Do you have a widget to monetize your blog?
Is this a task (proofing code) we’ll have to start doing?