EXPERIMENT TIME I hope you can help me with! I was being crushed by widget overload — I go to many blogs, I see too many boxes, buttons, and links to click on. Too many widgets.
Over time, I've stripped mine down to simplify choice and present "core essentials". But there's still other stuff I wanna show off! So… what I ended up doing was using the Ad Rotator plugin, which displays a random bit each time you reload my blog ON THE LEFT, LOOK!!!! — right now, it could be a video, my Twitter feed, etc.
BTW, I found Vimeo videos "intelligently" get their chrome removed when you embed them at small sizes and only show a play/pause button when you hover over them. VERY nice. blip.tv vids don't do that, but Aaron from blip.tv (thx!) rapidly reached in to tell me their Legacy Player is chromeless, which I'll have to… play with soon.
I plan to play with some "fake ads" and other lunatic whimsicality in the future, but before I make those mistakes…
What would you like to see in the box o' RANDOM FUN?
(The quickest stuff I can add are any embeddable widgets and videos I have up!)
Earlier, I was trying the Disqus commenting service but it played badly with my blog: it didn't match the CSS and it also spewed out duplicate comments.
To their credit, Disqus was extremely fast in replying to my help email — thanks guys! — and I did a reset on the dupes and uninstalled Disqus for the time being. That cleared up most of it.
However, there's now bizarre wonkiness in my land o' blog, including wrong comment counts on some (but not all) posts — workaround for that appears to simply make a new comment.
There may be other residual oddities and I'll have a closer look later. In the meantime, pardon for the rift in time and space…
And not an easy one to ask, but because I value your opinion, it must be done:
If I were to focus further on a specific subject so my personal blog is more useful + fun for you, what would it be?
Free answers in comments graciously appreciated; I know I didn’t set this up as a multiple-choice poll, but I’m curious to hear what you think all the same.
I had to smile when I saw their unofficial slogan, "aggregation without the aggravation" on Guy Kawasaki's blog. A little over a month later, I've been hand-picked for the popurls-like virtual.alltop.com alongside numerous other collections of choice sites, like the Official Second Life Blog (DISCLAIMER: I write for them too). This is quite an honor, considering (1) Kawasaki is one of my heroes, (2) I'm a rabid fan of aggregators (efficiency!), and (3) the people behind the site seem really nice (#3 is the most important). I got a most welcome email from Kathryn Henkens (who runs it along with Will and Guy), and I was like "YAYZERAMA!"
Thanks, I feel really good, but I'm having a hard time finding a badge that suits my modesty! (I'll make some sidebar space too…)
But suddenly, I find myself becoming more self-critical whilst questioning the classification of certain other sites: e.g., Gabes Virtual World has a nice set of crayons, but has more to do with virtualization than 3D spaces on the Internet. And those cute Club Penguin guys need a better title than "What's New". I am sure like contents of boxes, this will settle over time. Some of my personal faves have yet to be included, too.
But suddenly (2x), I feel under pressure to write meaningful posts which are useful to you. Good pressure, since I was already doing that, and there's gonna be more. ("Quality in quantity," that's what I say!) Coming up, then:
- What do you want me to blog about?
I also guarantee:
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