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If you work with a small blogging network then using shared boxes on your blogs can literally save you hours of hard work maintaining and updating your blogs.
At it's simplest, a shared box is a small area on a web page which displays content held in a seperate file on the server. Because the content itself remains on an independent file, it can be called from as many different web pages as you like and displayed simultaneously on all of them.

Why Bother?

Now you may be thinking that you can do that anyway in Wordpress by including the same content in a text widget on each of your blogs. Well that's true, you can do it that way of course, and initially that's a quick simple solution which anyone can use. But the big advantage of using a shared box is that if you wish to change that content at any time, then you need only edit one file instead of a different widget on each of your blogs.

To give you an example of this, I include a shared box in the top of the sidebar on all my blogs. That box takes its content from a single file on one of my servers. I use it to display a banner advert promoting whichever site I wish to push at the time. It means that if I receive an email from BadGirlBucks, telling me that their paysite SockSorority will be paying double commissions on sales for the next three days, I can have a SockSorority banner ad, (like the one on the right), on every blog in my teen network within a few minutes.

Ok So What's Involved?

It's easy to do this using a little PHP code and a great little Wordpress plugin called Samsarin PHP Widget. Once installed this plugin generates a special text widget which will allow any PHP code placed in it to be executed. Once we have that up and running we then need to build a file with the content we wish to display and call it from the new widget.

First Install Samsarin.

Download the Samsarin plugin by either clicking here, or using our download file at the end of this article. Unzip the download package and upload the file called samsarin-php-widget.php to the /wp-content/plugins directory for your blog using your favourite ftp software or online hosting control panel.
Next, go to your Wordpress blog admin console and click on the 'Plugins' tab. Here you should see Samsarin listed and you can then click to activate it.