A Consuming Experience

I'm now pleased to unveil... the Magical Sheep Spring Collection of New Blogger Widgets! Designed for the cool New Blogger about town who wants to grab some widgets for their blog using New Blogger's neat Add Page Elements feature. Brought to you by the Magical Sheep team, Kirk and Improbulus.

Yes, you too can now add a widget to your blog simply by clicking a button or two and dragging the widget in Layouts, if you're using the now feature complete fancy New Blogger, formerly known as Blogger Beta. G'wan, whatcha waiting for? (Produced since people can now make and share their own widgets to enable bloggers to easily add third party widgets to their blog layouts with a few clicks without having to know any coding, e.g. the Bluepulse widget.)

The widgets collection

At the moment, the collections page just has Technorati stuff for widgets relating to the blogosphere search engine Technorati, plus links (for completeness) to some clever widgets etc for New Blogger by Kirk:

• Technorati Blog Top Tags tagcloud widget -see further this post, the Technorati tools page and Technorati blog post
• Technorati Blog Authority widget - see this post, the Technorati tools page plus this intro and further explanation from the Technorati
• Technorati Link Counter widget for individual posts - see this post, and Technorati's link count page, blog intro and David Sifry's blog
• Kirk's Picasa Web Albums widget maker
• Kirk's Blogger label cloud instructions.
  

I thought it would be helpful to have a bunch of widgets together on one page, and I do plan to add to the list in future. More importantly, I'm using Google Pages for those Add widget forms because Blogger is still messing up the code on this blog on publishing when the forms are within a Blogger post, so if you tried the buttons from my previous posts and they didn't work, that's why - sorry about that, they should work fine on the new page.

Technorati tag cloud design; Technorati bugs

Now, more on the Technorati tagcloud. The comment by Tantek Çelik (Technorati's chief technologist) about how to get the cloud to look better in my blog was helpful, but it only applies to my specific blog. Your mileage may vary.

Far be it for a novice still finding her way to beg to differ from a CSS guru, never mind one who's had a hack named after him. But I still think Technorati could have, and can yet, make it easier for us mere users, especially non-CSS experts (which means most of us!) to tweak the format of the Technorati cloud to tie in better with the designs of their own individual blogs - as Delicious have done with their own tag cloud. For more details, see further my response to Tantek's comment, which I won't repeat here.

I'd be interested to know what others think of this issue, and of course whether Technorati will be improving things at their end. It's great that David (I assume that's Dave Sifry, Technorati CEO though he seems to have a different Blogger profile now) has just reported that a bug causing legit blogs not to be indexed has finally been fixed.

But I won't be holding my breath about stuff like styling clouds, given that their ongoing problems with tags is still extant despite David's acknowledgement of my bug report and assurance way back in February 2006 that they'd get to the bottom of the issue. Now that he's reporting on the state of tags as well as the blogosphere generally, surely it's more important than ever that Technorati should be accurate in its recording of tags. Which it won't be, if it still keeps inexplicably missing out on picking up the tags from entire posts on reams of blogs.

Labels: blog metrics, New Blogger, tagging, tools

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