Hot, fresh widgets: Bloglines Notify Widget for Konfabulator. Rather obviously, it displays the number of unread items in your Bloglines account. Clicking on the number will open your browser, pointed at your feeds panel. You can configure the amount of time to wait between updates (default 1 minute), and of course the widget needs to know your Bloglines login (email address) before it will do its magic.

I used a feed reader for about a week before I decided it wasn’t for me and went back to regular web-based Bloglines, but I missed having instant notification of new feed items. Bloglines does have their own notifier, but why not use a widget if you’re already running Konfabulator?

I’m beginning to see just how powerful and simple widgets can be. Total time from idea to completion was less than an hour, and most of that was spent deciding what the widget should look like.