Everyone wants their badge on your blog
Out with the Old
In response to a comment about web page load time, I’ve removed a few widgets and badges from the left column and streamlined a few other things.
The three Facebook badges seem to have been the main culprits for Javascript errors. Despite the fact there are 400 million people on Facebook, which makes it hugely popular by any definition, they’re gone. I can't change the scripts or the load time from Facebook's servers for the data that runs in the widgets.
The Postrank ‘Top Blog Posts’ widget is gone too because the rankings seem to be circular. People tend to click on these items even though the service measures all clicks on all links. They’ll continue to measure the clicks, but the badge was randomly appearing and disappearing depending on what browser you used to view the blog.
The ‘Recent Blog Posts’ widget from Blogger is gone because most of the time it just didn’t work. I did not find an answer to the problem in the Blogger Help forum.
All three of the Technorati widgets are gone including the ‘Cloud Tag,’ the 'Authority’ badge, and one that allowed you to make the blog a ‘Favorite.' The Technorati web site says the company no longer supports any of them and that it has moved on to providing other services.
A whole bunch of small badges from various blog tracking services are gone. They didn't do much, and just added to the visual clutter. To speed things up generally, I deleted two widgets that pulled data from their home pages in order to display information here. They include one that displayed CO2 data from an observatory in Hawaii and a weather widget from the Weather Channel .
In the with New
The blog roll has been upgraded to show the most recent post from each site and the time of the last update. This seems to be a popular feature one that has been widely adopted by other sites that use the Blogger service.
The blog now features a Tweet feed from the ‘Nuclear Tribe,” which is a continuous stream of blog posts from about 50 people, at this point, who post on Twitter about nuclear energy. The number of people using it will likely grow over time.
Still Standing
Several of the online services will continue. They include the Sphere ‘What’s Related’ button at the bottom of each blog post and the Add This drop down menu to tie into social media also located at the footer of each blog post.
The Adaptive Blue service embedded in blog posts highlights movies, books, and Wiki entries. There is an extension for it that works with Mozilla’s Firefox.
Lastly, the Twitter feed that accompanies this blog is at the top of the list. People seem to enjoy it.
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I’m always interested in feedback about these kinds of issues. Please leave a comment here or drop me an email: djysrv [at] gmail [dot] com. Thanks.
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2 comments:
For what it's worth, this site now loads very quickly on my system and doesn't hang up waiting for unfinished items to load. If you think losing the Facebook stuff is a problem, maybe you could try bringing that back but leaving out the other stuff that you dropped.
--E. Michael Blake
Dan, it looks a lot better. I never had problems with the site loading, but I did find it cluttered. Much easier to read now!
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