If you've worked with ASP.NET MVC (or similar stack) web applications, you've likely noticed that it's very common to see some sort of sidebar widget with supplemental information. If you've got a page and want to display some handy summary information, like statistics for the site, doing so is basically the easiest thing in the world. We're going to walk through the different pieces in a sample setup of this which I've used in this very blog to get the site stats widget you see over there to the right.