Yet Another Neat Thing My Forward-Looking Employer Has Wrought

If you've read Antick Musings much at all, you know that I'm fond of widgets. And who wouldn't be? They actually do stuff -- sometimes even useful stuff -- and they're called widgets.

So I was thrilled to see in my e-mail this morning that my employer, the mighty house of Wiley, has created a widget for linking to our books. "But, Andy," you might say, "other publishers have done this before, so it's no big deal."

Ah, but are those publishers global? I bet they aren't. Nearly everything Wiley publishes is available everywhere in the world, and so our landing page detects where a user is, and lists bookselling options local to that user. Can your other publishers say as much?

Anyway, the main point of these is to allow authors to post nice little snippets of code on their webpages to show off their books, but there's no reason that only authors can get into the act. If you're enamored of Applied Polymer Rheology, show your love!

For example, here's a book I've worked on, which I think is both deeply neat and underloved:


All you need to create a widget of your very own is a Wiley ISBN and this here website. Go on, it's fun!

Another Widget!

I managed to get through forty years of life without ever having someone make a widget for me, but I've now been partially responsible for two of them in the past two months. The first one was for the mighty Wiley CPA Exam Review, which I doubt any of you cared about. But this new widget might be of interest to more folks -- it's about US tax deductions (and who doesn't like saving money on taxes?)

This widget is driven by the vast tax expertise of the J.K. Lasser Institute, which is also behind a series of books, particularly a big line-by-line annual tax guide. (And you may think that those are obsolete in this era of software, but it really is quite helpful to do your taxes yourself directly, to see what the numbers really are, instead of letting software spoon-feed you.)

The widget displays a different deduction every day for tax season, with links to the usual longer (and inevitably dryer) discussion of the details.

Please feel free to stick this anywhere you feel like -- the point is to distribute it widely, and it has all of the usual functionality for adding it to Facebook, various blog templates, e-mails, and so on.

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for.... the WIDGET!