As you can see (unless you’re viewing this through the RSS/Atom feed), I’ve changed the theme and added a bunch of Amazon Associates widgets to the right-hand sidebar. The theme is OK, not great, but pretty clean. From my point of view, its delightfully simple – perhaps half the size of the previous one, measured in lines of code. The original was in German, though, so I had to go through translating the text into English. Please let me know if I missed anything.
As for the Associates widgets: yes, I know that they add to the page load time. Most people wouldn’t use so many relatively heavyweight widgets. (I’m just using three right now, but you can expect to see the number, and the selection, change.) On the other hand, this does highlight any latency and rendering issues. Is it better to get a simple frame and header in place before starting any of the content, or should we do most of the heavy lifting on the server side?
The most interesting widget should be the first, Page Recommender, because the content is based on the viewer’s history. I have no idea what you are seeing in this widget; what I see is based on my own history. And it’s going to take a while for the widget to build up a history of page views on my site. It may well be the case that my kind of blog is simply the wrong kind of site for this widget. If most people simply read the current entries via the base URL, and don’t check the comments or older postings, there may not be enough intra-site traffic for the widget to work with. In that case you’ll probably see nothing but product links.
These are not the only off-site widgets that I use, by the way. The other obvious example is the Shared Items from Google Reader. I read most of my daily web content (154 feeds!) through Google’s RSS aggregation, and I tag as “Shared” various items that I think my audience might like to read. These show up in the sidebar widget, under the (presumptuous!) heading “Items from other blogs that you should be reading”. This is really convenient for me, but it doesn’t generate blog content in the same way that, say, a “Links of the day” posting does. In fact, I suspect that the crawlers don’t index content from this kind of widget, so I’m not really helping myself or the items I’m recommending.
Perhaps I need to switch to using del.icio.us, which is how I presume Adriana is generating her “Links” postings, but it will mean finding an alternative RSS reader: one that has built-in del.icio.us support. (And it must work on the iPhone. I read a lot of my RSS feeds whenever I have a few moments: on the shuttle bus between Amazon buildings, standing in line at Starbucks, waiting for a soccer game to start at Qwest field….)
Entries (RSS)
Geoff, I’d stick with Google Reader. The RSS it generates is just fine.
Various comments — I’m not digging the green/orange/blue colors,but that’s me. I like the 3 columns though.
Apparently the first Amazon widget is picking up info from my web history/cookies, as it’s offering me some things similar to what I last saw when I visited the amazon home page. Amusingly, these include college guide books, which I no longer need, as my darling daughter has already picked a college, thank you very much.
More feedback – First try was on Firefox browser, this one on Internet Explorer. In the first case, there was some blue “white space” around the whole thing, and it was relatively clean looking. In this one (on a different machine), it is crammed to the edges, so that the actual blog content is crammed to the left of the page. The fonts are different too, and a bit “grainy” and harder to read. I’ll send you a screen shot.
Geoff,
I like the new theme and the hints about widgets. I have been thinking about adding some new ones to my blog.
Thanks, Marion
Well, I wound up switching to Mandigo, one of the most common themes. Incredibly flexible. I’ll create a customized header image this weekend.
geoff:
Please consider tracking/adding articles from the ATHEIST REVOLUTION blog. vjack’s consistently superior & timely articles would make a good addition to your very informative website. I just stumbled on to it today, quite good. Keep up the great work!
Annac