widgets

A battle seems to be hotting up between MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog for the superest mega-widget of all time.

I mentioned the BlogCatalog offering earlier, which you can see in my sidebar, which tells you what I’ve been up to across various networks. Now, MyBlogLog are offering what I’d describe as a giant version of the same, designed to be embedded in a page. You can see mine in my About page. Underneath the static blurb, you’ll notice a dynamic offering letting you know what I’ve been doing recently (on the Net, that is!).

Which one’s best? They serve different purposes, really, even though they offer similar information. The BlogCatalog widget sits nicely in a sidebar, and the MyBlogLog version sits very well in a page. The MyBlogLog version is almost an embeddable version of FriendFeed for your own site, which is pretty neat.

I like them both. Trouble is, the number of widgets is now creeping back up on my blog!

Regular readers (are there any?) may have noticed a new widget over in the sidebar. Yes, I know, I said I was going to be cutting back on them. I’ve been pretty good lately, but this new one from Blog Catalog actually seems pretty useful.

If you take a look, you can see all the things I’ve been up to recently on various “social” sites, including Twitter, Flickr, my blog posts and a bunch of other services.

I realise most widgets are actually useless after I’ve used them for a while, but this seems better than most. I don’t see it having a place on every blog, but it seems well suited to a “personal” blog such as this.

I’ll leave it on the site for a while and see what, if any, impact it has.

Since removing BlogRush from here, I’ve had some spare space for a widget, so I’ve added a great new one from ScratchBack.

You can see it in action in the sidebar. The idea is simple. You give me a “tip” of a measly $5.00 for all my hard work and you get to add a text link, with a tool-tip type description that shows when you hover over the link.

They’ve been “pre-approved” by Google, so you’ll not get involved in all the recent losing your page rank nonsense.

What do you think?

Further to my previous post on WidgetBucks, they’ve now updated their code to speed up loading. I’m not convinced it’s that much quicker, but it’s good to see they’re trying to resolve the problem. WidgetBucks sent out an email to users last night:

One of the concerns we’ve heard from many of you has been the slow loading times of our widgets. We really appreciate your feedback and comments in helping us improve in this area. So, today we addressed this issue by rolling out new code that ultimately delivers faster loading widgets.

You need to re-install your widget code to take advantage of the changes.

I’ll keep an eye on it and report back in a week or so.

I’ve been trying out WidgetBucks on a few of my blogs for the past few weeks. If you’ve not heard of them before, they’re a fairly new company that lets you create an advertising widget to place on your blog or web site - look at the sidebar here on Psionmark for an example.

Widget creation is pretty straightforward. You specify the size and colour of your widget, then tell it the category of items you’d like to appear in the widget, or tell it to automatically select items based on the content of your site/blog. Once you’ve finished creating it, simply drop the supplied code into your page and you’re set.

Clickthrough rates have been pretty good. On one of my sites, I’ve seen as high as 10%, which is better than any other product I’ve tried. One nice little incentive is that they’re offering a $25.00 bonus for new signups. Once you’ve received $25.00 from the ad placements, they’ll add the $25.00 bonus to your account.

Despite this, I’ve decided to, at least for now, remove it from my most popular blog. There are 2 main reasons for this:

1. The ads shown are not particularly relevant to the content of the blog
2. Speed. These widgets slow down the page load way too much. I was taking a hit of more than 10 seconds which, frankly, is not acceptable

This is a shame, as the ads themselves look pretty slick and I think they draw the eye of readers, which is a good thing. I’m going to leave them in place for now on my other lower traffic sites and I’ll keep an eye on their performance. If I see a sudden improvement in either speed or number of categories - or preferably both - I’ll reconsider them for my main site.