Google Gadgets for your web page

Google is allowing google gadgets to be added to web pages. Some time back I found it but then when I went through the google home page there were options to add to the home page only. But then some how found the link again. Though there is huge number of gadgets(at the time of blogging there were 4682) to be I found very few interesting. One of them was the Custom RSS This allows a list to be displayed based on rss feed. What I have done is used the rss feed from Google Blog search for the key word blogging tools and displaying it.
Other widget/gadget I found interesting was the picasa web album widget which displays random photos from your album.
There are lot widgets/gadgets in different categories from news, tools, communication to technology. There are many games as well. But all of them require script to be added to the web page.
Only drawback I found was customization of gadgets is cumbersome compared to other widget libraries. For example only color that can be chosen is the border color for the rest you need to give hexa decimal values. There is more needs to be done in the gadget customization.
The different part is you can leave comments for the developer of the widget and contact too! I am not sure if other widget libraries allow this.

Blogger Templates

I was trying to get a new template for my blog. Here are the links I found.
P.S.

• Most of the templates are the classic templates which can be used by shifting to the classic template mode. But you can not do the page element based modification of the template.
• Many templates give the image separately and ask you to host on free photo hosting service(like imageshack) and edit the links in the template. Some give the template with embedded links you may want to move them to your preferred hosting service. For one of the templates I was trying there were png and gif images which I was not able to upload to picasa. I am not sure if blogger allows anything other than jpeg format.

Here is the list I copied from digg. I wanted to clip using clipmark and blog it but it turned out be there is a limit of 1000 characters for public clips which can be blogged. Other thing I found was once you clip you can edit the content of the clip i.e. u can not remove certain characters (or was it the browser playing tricks ?)

1. Grand Stream Dreams: "New" Blogger Template Resources

   Links about blogger template, trick tips and how to go about creating your own template
   to Blogger template ... saved by 8 other people

2. Blogger Templates: 4.5 Million Blogspot Users are Lazy at Digital Inspiration

   All the previously tagged sites are reviewed here

   to blogger templates ... saved by 38 other people

3. Blogger Templates (Beta) at Gecko & Fly

   edit / delete

   Has got templates for new Blogger

   to blogger templates ... saved by 43 other people ... 6 hours ago

4. Free Templates

   edit / delete

   Nearly 200 templates, Has classic templates as well as some new templates

   to Blogger templates ... saved by 176 other people ... 6 hours ago

5. Blogger templates - noipo.org

   12 templates, has a instruction guide and there is some manual work required to upload the photographs

   to templates blogger ... saved by 209 other people ...

6. Blogger Templates

   to templates Blogger ... saved by 205 other people

7. Blogger Templates

   Has got some nice Ajax based templates but when I tried to use them I got parser error.May be they are classic templates ?
   
8. to templates blogger ... saved by 19 other people
9. 
   

10. Blogger templates

    to blogger templates ... saved by 1668 other people
    

Blog using Clipmark

I am trying out clipping using clipmarks and then blogging. Clipmarks is much more sophisticated than the google notes I have been using. It allows clip text, video, then tag them and blog them too !!

clipped from mail.google.com

FuelMyBlog has been Re-Fueled


By Drew(Drew)


A Today's Top Blogs and Latest Blogs. You will always know what blogs are added and what ones are listed as top blogs. On this page you can Add your Blog, go to the Forum and get your page Widgets (see above voting images and click ...



The BenSpark - http://benspark.blogspot.com/index.html

Hittail

I have put the Hit tail on my blog. In their on words Hit tail is

"HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. We present these terms to you as suggestions that when acted on can boost the natural search results of your site. It's that simple.

Of course, HitTail is built with sophisticated algorithms and patent-pending technology that took our Chief HitTailer a while to develop."

I would like to see the results after a week. When I put this on the other blog, it failed to detect any activity let us see what happens this time.

Website Plagiarism

I was trying some of the website plagiarism detectors this what I found. My test case was trying to detect a copy of one of the posts put on my test blog.

Copyscape allows you search free of cost on their website. I tried by giving the blog url. There were no results found. Copyscape suggested to search by categories. Then I tried the specific URL of the blog post. I got the matching results. When you click on the results it will open up the page with copied words highlighted in different colors. I am not sure what is the significance of different colors. Here is how it looks like. I guess for premium users automatic alerts generated when copy is found.



Next one was Sentinel. Here I had to create a login. Sentinel is in beta. Couple of days after my registering still it was crawling. But the GUI looks promising. But when I clicked on the links all were taking me to the top of the page.

Blogger widgets wish list

I wish if blogger could provide following widgets for adding to blog.

1. Previous and Next post links - Though there are couple of hacks available they are very much dependent upon blogging frequency ? Its not straight forward. Setup archive etc etc. I checked the GData API's and found that data returned by blogger is not in any order and the entry ids looked like random numbers so I suppose based on time the blog post need to be searched and displayed.
Here is one of the hacks from freshblog Blog navigator next and previous links

2. Related articles - I see lot of people using it and wordpress has plugin for this.
Hoctro's place has a hack available

3. Ability to add trackbacks - For the time being I am using haloscan which provides real easy way of doing it. Download the template from blogger upload to haloscan, get the modified template and post it to blogger. But you will have to use haloscan for managing comments as well. Many people used to suggest haloscan as if you were move away from blogger, comments will still show up in the new blog through haloscan. With blogger allowing redirection to custom domains, it may not be good idea to have posts at one place and comments at another place.

4. Recent Comments widget - Though I do not have comments now, I am optimistic that this blog will have some discussion at some point of time :). I checked the haloscan already provides this widget.
freshblog lists 4 hacks available under this category !

How to add translators your blog ?

There many services which can translate your blog and show. On click of the button the page gets translated and shown to the user. I came across two of this services.

Babel Fish of Altavista - Which provides translation in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Portugese and by adding javascript which generates the image like below. When the user clicks on the country flag, the page is translated to that language.

Google Translator - has more languages supported but does not provide widgets to add translation to the page. There multiple hacks available.
a) Amit Agarwal provides a way to add flags at Add Language Translation to your Website - Tutorial
b) Mani Karthik provides an alternate version using which you can add drop down box
at Google translator plugin for blogger ; I preferred this one to displaying too many flags.

As I got the error document.nav does not have properties, I have made small changes to code provided by Mani Karthik and changed the language text to respective languages. Below is the code you can use for blogger. Remember to change the my blog URLs to your own URL

<div><br /><select id="SelectURL" onchange="document.location.href=document.getElementById('SelectURL').options[document.getElementById('SelectURL').selectedIndex].value"><option selected="selected" value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cen&u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com">Translate this blog</option><option value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Ces&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com">español</option><option value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cit&u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com">Italiano</option><option value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cfr&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com">Français</option><option value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cpt&u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com">Portuguese</option><option value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Car&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com">العربية</option><option value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cja&u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com"> 日本語</option><option value="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cko&u=http://blogaddins.blogspot.com"> 한국어</option></select></div>

I guess these features should be provided in blog feeds and mails !!

Blogging Tools and Widgets Statistics Part 2

I continued my work on finding out what people use on their blogs. This time I wanted to represent the facts better and came out with cloud after visiting around 25 blogs. I have setup 2 alerts on google blog search. I used the blogs that showed up in the alerts. So these should be the active blogs. Top three are

1. Technorati - It includes display of technorati badge or, technorati favorite this icon, or displaying technorati profile or technorati search box.
2. Feeburner - Is the top choice when it comes to managing the feeds. Either people do not give option subscribe explicitly or use feedburner. Rarely I came across any other option. Most of the people use the big feed icon instead of the feedburner chiklet or other widgets provided by feedburner.
   
3. Adsense - Google Adsense is the preferred advertising program.

When it comes blog publishing tool top three are

1. Wordpress - Users quote availability of large number of themes, comment spam mangement tool Akismet and large developer community.
2. Typepad - Typad comes next to wordpress
3. blogger - I feel that the blogs published on blogger are no that active blogs. As the basis for selecting blogs was the alerts, only active blogs were selected. Even though blogger might be hosting a large number of blogs only few might be actively posting or optimized for the search (?)

Outcome of the study as cloud.

adsense(10) amazon(4) b5media(2) blogburst(3) blogflux(2) blogger(3)blogtopsites(4) clustermaps(4) creative commons(7)delicious(8) federated media(2)feedblitz(6) feedburner(13) flickr(5) google analytics(6) google search(7)mybloglog(4) sitemeter(2) statcounter(3)technorati(14) typepad(5) wordpress(9)

Stats on Blog widgets and tools

I wanted to find out what are the most used widgets and tools on a blog. For this I thought of visiting 30 blogs randomly selected on blogger as it has the next blog link on it tool bar. It was surprising to see that what most of the blogs used was

• Profile
• Archive
• Previous Posts
• AdSense
• Google Search
• Links

There were just 2 blogs using Technorati and 3 blogs with counters. I had to remove many tools from comparison as they had only one blog using them .. some of them being feedburner, odeo, book list etc.Some blogs just had google search and adsense obviously targeted at the keyword search. I could not find out the hidden widgets/tools such as google analytics, mybloglog tracking or any other hidden trackers. I am posting the spread sheet created below and so that anybody interested can come out with their own interpretation.

Some Good posts on Blogging tools and widgets

Read/Write Web talks about how to use widgetbox to add widgets your blogs, it also lists the top 5 widgets for the year 2006
Read More...

Widgetbox has lot of widgets here are the numbers by category

• Blogosphere -118
• Communication - 45
• Fun and Games - 70
• Interests - 72
• Information - 112
• Media - 74
• Money Makers - 27
• Other - 45

Thats lot of widgets created by widgetbox and other contributors.

There is also a old post on Quick Online Tips which is supposed to be updated periodically lists 14 essential tools for blogging including Technorati, Mybloglog, AdSense and Haloscan for trackbacks.
Read More Here ...

Pro Blogger gives big alphabetical list of all the tools which include tools for posting a blog, tools for offline editing blogs etc.
Read More... Here

Update
Widgetoko is another good site which keeps reviewing widgets for the blog.

Update
Thanks to Howard Lindzon here is another good blog, Widgets Lab maintained by Derek Anderson.

Update
Avinash writes on blogging tools from his experience - Blogging: How-to's, Technical Tips and Best Word Press Plugins

Update
Improbulus writes about new blogger page layout management - New Blogger: page elements widgets code reference and tutorial

I will periodically update this post, as and when I get good links

Google Analytics

There are many which provide help you to collects statistics about your site. econsultant lists 12 sites under web analytics. I have checked following

1. MyBlogLog provides basic things such as how many clicks, incoming links and outgoing links


2. Google Analytics - This is just great! You have all you need. You can see how many page views, how many visitors, from unique visitors, returning visitors, geographical area of the visitors, incoming and outgoing links, how long the users are staying(This information lets you know if users directed to your blog actually interested in) . That too graphical representation of executive summary and there are details reports.
   




3. Clicky Click - This is another way of putting it but does not tell you from where are the visitors coming only IP is provided. This is the big missing feature compared to Google Analytics but presentation is intresting though there arent any graphs

There are lot of others which of offer stats like sitemeter which give you aggregate of the number of visits, for high volume pages there is alexa widget

Mybloglog

mybloglog is one of frequently used tools in my other blog mainly to find out stats(search key words), who is reading the blog etc. One of the things I noticed was people were being directed to my blog for searches route map etc but they were not finding so I had make those links prominent. Things like this can be found by seeing the search key words used to reach your page and what were the outgoing links in your page. Google Analytics has nice way to find out if the page was useful, they call it bounce rate. You will come to know if the visitor is leaving you blog immediately.

• Using mybloglog one can find simple statistics like what are the incoming links including search terms, outgoing links, and links viewed on the page.


• One can also add mouse over text showing the popularity of the links


• Once logged into mybloglog a community can built around the blogs. This make easier find people with similar interests. It also lists hot links in the community.


• Newest feature being adding most recent visitors list with their photos to the blog.

All these can be done using adding javascript to the template. Registration is simple and later on profile can be updated with photograph and blog snapshot.

Add Snap Preview to your blog

I tried the snap preview feature, which was there on techcrunch. Once can easily add to their blog or website. Register and snap will give a java script to be inserted. Whenever the user hovers on the links in webpage a snap shot will be shown. But if you have already some feature implemented for hovering links that may not work.(Such as showing popularity of the link when somebody hovers on it) Here is the snapshot