widgets

I’ll confess now that I’m a serial widget abuser. Show me a new widget and it’ll be on one of my sites within seconds. (Witness my previous post for an example).

However, I had to ask myself a question today: “Who am I writing my blogs for?”. The harsh realisation was that, whilst I invariably write the content for the benefit of others, the actual layout of the sites is pretty much driven by my insatiable appetite for gadgets!

Whilst I might love the whizzy-doobery-search-widget-with-magic-pixie-dust-tag-cloud, marvelling at the ingenuity of the developers, is it actually of benefit to the visitors to my sites? I’ve got some more analysis to do (back to the stats obsession - you can see a pattern emerging here…), but my initial thoughts are that, on the whole, they probably don’t. I’m starting to slowly realise that a nice, simple but functional text search box is actually probably more useful to visitors than a mega-widget that takes up half the screen space. This also allows me to move other useful stuff up above the fold where visitors might actually get to see it.

Will I dump them all? Unlikely. Some are actually very useful but some, I’ll now admit, are really just eye candy and they’re beginning to clutter things up.

So, is this an upset for me? No. In fact, in some ways it’s quite a liberating realisation. For one, once I’ve thinned down the sites and got rid of at least some of the stuff they don’t really need, I can concentrate on the actual content which is, after all, why people visit the sites. I’m sure my regular readers don’t really return just to see my widgets collection.

More thoughts on this subject later.

Tagging your blog posts can be a hit and miss affair. It’s often difficult to think of just the right tags and also to decide how many to show.

A new company - Jiglu - aims to make this easier for bloggers with their auto-tagging widget. The idea is simple enough. It’ll spider your site, automatically pulling out tags from existing content. I’ve just installed it here and on one of my other blogs - FlightSimX. You can see it in action here in the sidebar.

It hasn’t had a chance to spider either site yet, but I like the idea and shall at the very least keep it on these sites for a while to see how they perform.

You get a nice level of control of the widget itself, including the ability to change its size and colour. Any changes are dynamic. As soon as you change anything in your control panel, it’s reflected on your blog. You don’t have to re-install the code/widget.

If it works as intended, this’ll be a great tool for anyone who runs a blog.

Update: In accordance with my next post (!), I’ve decided to remove Jiglu for now and have replaced it with the Spotplex Popular Posts widget, which has proven very popular in my other blogs.