What To Do When Widgets for non-CMS Websites Become Extinct
A screenshot from Peace in Practice. Photo provided by Celine Lai

In 2002 I designed, created and uploaded my website “Peace in Practice” to the World Wide Web. This was in the times of the ICQ internet relay chat, MySpace (before Facebook) and beautiful customizable online forums run by Yuku, Mixt and Ning.

There was a sea-life widget on my homepage, and using Stat Counter I found that every day there was a view of that page. That was until the widget was no longer maintained! Widgets and footer bars for websites not running on proprietary platforms soon became “dinosaurs.”

“We want my Fish widget back!” Here is the tale of a “widget withdrawal” experience.

If you do a Google search upon “widgets for websites” you will find “Elfsight” which has widgets for social media, marketing, selling, and communication; but no Sea-life Widget.

I reminisce over the good old days when independent website creators could find delightful entertaining and realistic or fun widgets for their web pages. These included not only clocks and calendars and standard items on modern WordPress blogs and other websites, but things like bubbles and unicorns and yes, sea-life.

The closest today that I can find of a fish widget is one where tadpole-like orange fish chase your cursor around. Of course, there are amazing fish or aquarium screen-savers, with fish you can choose, and metrics you can use to tailor your fishy scene.

But some of us “oldies” feel deprived of a range of quality website widgets.

My website, PIP, was a labour of love, mainly my love. Though I no longer update this site, I am proud of it, even if it has the longest homepage on Earth, and even if the code behind it is garbled and terrifying.

With want and will and creativity, I adorned the homepage with an animated marquee (which a friend kindly created for me) and inter-wove many other hopefully interesting or enticing elements!

I used the good old fashioned tried and true explorer’s way. I went on a “search and use” mission. This meant scouring the WWW back then, looking at hundreds of other websites and at what elements they used. I then peeked at the source code to understand how they had programmed these elements.

Microsoft FrontPage and coding by hand was used to create all pages of “Peace in Practice”. My tuition for this included a one-day course on learning about HTML (hypertext mark-up learning). This was a new skill that I was eager to develop. I leaped from baby steps, trying to shove my training CD into the floppy-disk drive, to turning out my PIP site.

Originally my website had a diagonal yellow moving banner for “Ten Million Clicks for Peace” across the top corner, which annoyingly (to some) moved down the page as one scrolled down. I thought this was pretty cool, especially because it linked to a personal “Peace Meter”. Gadgets are good. I like groovy or useful gadgets for websites. I like sea-life widgets too.

Another victim of modernisation was the Skysa footer bar. This was a footer widget with pop-up tabs for games, a search field, and a Comments page, and it was customisable. So I had a “Go to the top” function enabled in the Skysa bar. The games were great. I loved playing them until one day I found the bar no longer there. If you google “Skysa bar” you will find it last mentioned in 2012.

You might notice the script part for the Skysa bar still pops up when downloading the PIP home page, if you wait long enough for it to fully download. I left it there for sentimental reasons. I am not in a competition to win the “Best Website of the Early 2000s” after all.

Hey, programmers out there. Not all websites run on a “professional” content platform system, like WordPress or Drupal or what-have-you! Some of us still host our own websites as collections of HTML pages.

Back in 2002 there were uplifting web-rings or circles of websites, which were groups of related sites which one could move to from one to the next easily. Nowadays these have been replaced by SEO and browser searches and links from social media pages. I loved those web-rings, which no longer exist.

If you go to the “Resources” page of PIP, you will see great “holes”, like no current clock (widget gone) and maybe a message that you need Adobe Flash Player. Flash Player will be discontinued after December 2020 so I should really remove the phantom clocks from that page, too bad that I like those clocks. They are round clock-faces with analogue time. I’ll look for a website-ready widget for world clocks sometime, if I could be bothered.

It’s some consolation that my three month calendar running on JavaScript is still on the Resources page. 😅

It’s some dis-consolation to me that this Page may look a mess on some computers because of the mishaps with coding behind the scenes. Even today I get people emailing me asking me to add resources to the page, which amazes me. I reply that I am no longer updating that page. I don’t add that if ever the page is re-worked, I will then start checking the links regularly and will update or add to the page. Yes I can dream!

The “Reflections” page used to have background music playing when you went to it. But one day in a fit of misgivings about the preferences of my would-be audience, I removed it. But now I miss that music too, and I wish I could remember what the name of it was!

Back full circle to the beginning of the tale. I believe that when the homepage had its wonderful sea-life widget, that a person had the PIP homepage to start-up when opening their internet browser. I can imagine that person enraptured with the beautiful and soothing and colourful, water-filled scenes. Perhaps the poor person was stuck immobile somewhere (or not), and would gaze at the fishes swimming around serenely, for hours.

Then …….the daily views stopped when the widget went. I was chagrined, not because I had lost a viewer. Oh no, I thought, why the heck did they take down the Widgets??

What about my fishy fan? Both that person and I really missed the widget. I hoped that the viewer found a suitable replacement quickly. Not like me.

It has taken me years to work out what to do. First I desperately scoured the internet country-side, looking in vain for a fishy widget. I found some for a Mac computer, but I don’t have a Mac. Then it dawned upon me that videos on YouTube can be embedded. Could that be my solution?

The answer is: Yes. This is the alternative that I have found. Because widgets of old have become the victim of browsers not accepting Java apps, and of quick and easy builds on professional self-hosted or other hosted sites for profits or businesses, sea-life widgets for the hobbyist have gone AWOL (i.e. Absent Without Leave). Not to forget that website design for mobile phones don’t include large or complex widgets, so why have ocean widgets for a website that will “never” be viewed on a desktop computer?

I found “The Best 4K Aquarium for Relaxation” and I love it a lot. I embedded it into the homepage of “Peace in Practice”. Hooray, beautiful ocean fish have come to the door of my internet home! Too bad if an advert pops up now and then. Just click on the X to close it. It’s the price to pay for a free embed. You can go Full Screen too, and that is excellent.

You or I can watch fish for 2 hours on the homepage of PIP. Why would you, somebody may ask? My answer is:

“Well, YOU might not want to do so if your first go-to for ocean fish scenes is YouTube or Social Media or a fantastic modern website with the bees-knees in current technology; but there are people, believe it or not, who stumble across Peace in Practice.”

Maybe the person who had PIP running daily will re-visit, or another visitor will find and love my homepage because of the embedded fish scene.

For years I was sad because the widgets for websites that I wanted, were no longer being created. But now there has been a renaissance, and that is due to my going with what I can get!

This is a lesson for all, to keep up with changes and to use what’s available, but at the same time, keep supporting the use and the design and development of the products that you love. Never give up on them. Never surrender your dreams.

I am still waiting for an innovative Programmer to return back to the basics of developing and maintaining widgets for personal and hobbyist websites on desktop PCs. I may have to pay for it, but the first step is to get my sea-life widget back (without the adverts or using YouTube).

My “Peace in Practice” site may entirely be a fossil, but to me it is my sweet-heart. Such is the stuff that dreams are made of. 😍

The times have changed, but that doesn’t mean that what was replaced has no value. The widgets of old are a part of our history, and all websites have a role or use. In my case, “Peace in Practice” is my single-handed way of trying to encourage…..well….putting peace into practice. Now that I have fish on the homepage, I feel better now.
['Celine Lai']
['Technology', 'Productivity', 'Website Design', 'Programming', 'Widget']