Sidebar to the sidebar 

I'm not getting with the trend of blogs that have two right-hand side-by-side sidebars. It just doesn't look right to me, whether it's done to cram more ads in or just to accomodate more lists and widgets.

It's only going to get worse with more widgets getting introduced all the time.

I like widgets 

It's not that I'm not against widgets and little boxy featurettes in principle. It's just that a blog having a lot of them can start looking really junky really fast -- and having too many of them can slow down the loading of a page to the point where I don't always feel like waiting.

No doubt they are the hot new thing, especially if a common format emerges.

I was thinking just today about widgetizing some of the sidebar features we offer in our online publications at work so they could be used on other websites. It's kind of CMS-meets-widget for verticals.

We already supply weekly safety tips for bloggers and webmasters via Javascript include, designed to tuck into a sidebar, but it's a very manual project, not tied to a periodical or maintained in a CMS. What I was thinking about today was taking sidebar features we already prepare for a weekly e-mail newsletter, and offering them for use on external websites. We do sidebar boxes for a monthly survey showing the question for three weeks and the results for one; a fact of the week based on one of the news items; and a sort of advice column called "Ask the Library."

I'm not sure what would be the best way to deliver them. Javascript include or iframe, I suppose. Would there be any benefit in packaging them as a feed (or feeds with OPML)? Maybe not, unless we also provided an easy way to render them, which might not be that easy unless it was in an iframe, so might as well just iframe the CMS template directly. Just wondering out loud, go on about your business and I'll tell you when I work it out.