I’ve been using the awesome Dashalytics widget to pull my Google Analytics stats into my OS X Dashboard for a while now (the server-side analytics program Mint also has a cool widget you can install too). It’s wonderful being able to pull up a quick look at my site’s traffic without having to fire up a browser.

The latest version of OS X — Leopard — introduced web clips into Safari, which means you can now easily take a snapshot of any portion of a web site and create your own widget from it.

To create a web clip, just click on the scissors icon in Safari and then select the portion of the web site you want to view and click the Add button.

One stat I’ve been paying close attention to lately is the number of RSS readers on my blog – and Safari’s web clips let me do this very easily. I have Feedburner’s Feedcount displayed on my blog in the upper right-hand corner of this blog, so I just created a web clip of that section of my site to show on my dashboard.

Any other cool uses for web clips you’ve discovered?

Bonus Tip: You can style your widget with 6 pre-determined themes – just click the ‘i’ icon on the lower right corner of the widget.

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