New Blog Bling

I've heard from a lot of people that my blog sidebars are such a mess they can't deal with them.

It's true that I've got a ton of blog widgets on my sidebars and I think they are seriously impacting the page load times. I am sorry about that.

But I can't help myself. I find cool stuff and I want to play with it and my blog sidebars are my petri dishes. It's the place I get to play with new web stuff.

So with that intro, I want to introduce three new blog widgets I've added to my sidebars.

1 - coComment - On the right sidebar, under my community faceroll, I've added a coComment blog widget that in theory should list all the comments I've left on other blogs that also use coComment. And I've added coComment to this blog so you can do the same thing. I think there needs to be a consolidated comment system for the web and coComment is the closest thing to it right now. I've seen some cool stuff coming through my office that leads me to be hopeful that we are going to see even more good work in this area soon.

2 - Streampad player - also on the right sidebar, at the top of My Music links. This widget loads the last 50 mp3s I've posted to my blog and let's you play them as a playlist. It loads super fast but you can only listen while you have the blog page open. If you navigate away, the music stops. It would be great if you could launch the player into a new window and keep it playing. There are some other things I'd like to be able to do, like separate the mp3s I post from the podcasts I post, but for now, it's pretty damn cool and I invite all of you to hit the play button and listen the music flow.

3 - Root Worms - on the left sidebar right below my blogroll. I've been sending my clickstream data to Root Vaults via the attentiontrust recorder for a while now. These worms let me show my clickstream data to the world. Want to know what I've been searching on or clicking on? Just take a look at the root worms and you'll see. I need to get the attentiontrust recorder working on my new MacBook Pro as this data is just the search and clickstream data from my thinkpad which I've mostly stopped using. I hope to have that set up by the end of this week.

I will keep these widgets up for as long as I find them useful. I hope you like them too.

Comments

[Andrew]

Fred, you can never pass up the chance to give your blog a widgie.
I'm glad I subscribe to your feed... for the content it gives me, and for the sidebar stuff it doesn't.
Widgets are the cowbell of blogging.

[dragos]

they're cool - otoh they cause a lot of avc download time while browsing over the mobile phone. :)

[Dan]

Hey Fred,

Thanks for putting the Streampad mini player on your blog. I just added a quick update in response to your problem with navigating away from the page. If you click on the Streampad link on the bottom right it will open up a new page, load the list and start playing from the song you were on.

I would like to have provided a small popup player, but that is very hard to do when you have no control over the javascript on the parent page. It would also be impossible in mySpace since they do not allow Flash to have any communication with Javascript for security reasons.

[Ari Mir]

fred,

your sidebars are awesome...i wish more bloggers used widgets...widgets are a way for your blog readers to connect with you

k shameless plug...at mojungle we JUST released a widget version of our player last night...http://blog.mojungle.com

[leafar]

Cool stuff.
Streampad player especially....
but it was really slow ang get only the last mp3 I posted... will try again this week end.

[Dan Buell]

I come to this site for a lot of reasons, none more significant than keeping up with your widgets and seeing what cool things are out there! Keep it up!

Dan

[MaxS]

What is really irritating is that number of JS errors on this site increased x10 in last few months... of course its probably shody work by widget authors...but still irritating.

[scott]

YOu definitely have one of the blingin-est blogs around, Fred!

The speed is a little slow, but I find most of the widgets interesting. And like your earlier commentor said, there's always the feed for those who don't want to play.

[Dan]

leafar - is it slow to load every time, or just the first time? It takes a while on the first load because it has to inspect your page for mp3s. I looked at your site and only found 1 mp3 file.

I did however notice that it did not detect the correct RSS file as you have a few and fell back to scraping the html. I'll put a fix in for this soon.

[marco]

Fred, I'm a long time reader of your blog, and a coComment co-founder. Just wanted to say thanks for trying us out! Fortuitous timing - we're doing a major release today with a bunch of new features including ability to track all comments in a conversation (not just other users)and the ability to add comments on non-comment enabled sites. Check out the team blog for the run down...
http://www.cocomment.com/teamblog/
Looking forward to your feedback!

[Susan Reynolds]

Fred your load time is relatively quick for me, and you've got some interesting content in those sidebars.
And now you've met someone who can can give you a run for your money as far as "stuff." I'm running the cocomment box too, but many of your goodies are new to me.

[Andrew Fife]

CoComment is very cool!

[ellen]

I am using the root vaults and the root worm also. I can share with my friends where my attention has been without having to use a link. This makes my dialogues much quicker and easier with my friends.

I find the Attention Trust concept to be very cool. Mr. Goldstein has some very thought provoking stuff on his blog "Transparent Bundles." Thoroughly enjoyed his last series and am just now reading The War On Attention- should be really good.

[Easton Ellsworth]

Fred, thanks for alerting many people (more than you might think) to coComment. I've taken 22 responses to the newest version and added my thoughts to them, in hopes of motivating further improvement to what is already a great service.

[Rob]

Great blog! I've added a link to your blog on Blog of the Day under the category of Design. To view the feature of your blog, please visit http://blogoftheday.org/page/111915