Untimely Demise of Spotplex

Few days ago, while browsing my blog,
I noticed that one of my installed widgets was missing. GRRR! You can just imagine what my initial reaction was. But wait, can you guess which I am referring about?

It was Spotplex widget for Most Popular Post which suddenly disappeared. It saddened me since I just had it up and running for quite a while. If my memory serves me right, I had it installed only early part of April 2008. Still hopeful, however, I headed over to the site and inspected what happened.

Surprisingly, this is what I untiringly got from the site

Dear Spotplex users,

We regret to inform you that Spotplex is going offline. This was a very hard decision for us and we are sure you will miss the service as much as we do.

If you are interested in our assets or in knowing more on the shutdown of Spotplex, you can reach us at support@spotplex.com

Thanks for your support.

The Spotplex Team

Condolences

Note: If you have embedded a Spotplex tracking code on your site, please remove it. You might get an error message if you still have it beyond 5/9.

Too bad, there is nothing much I can do but to rest my case.

It was unfortunate, though, since I have not made any review yet concerning this tool. It is always my routine to test first the corresponding functions of any tool that I get to add on my site before making any recommendations or review. Sad to say so, I will not have that opportunity any longer.

My sincerest condolences to Spotplex for the untimely demise of Most Popular Post widget.

Read More

Free Blogger Widgets Directory

By this time, you would have chosen the appropriate template for your blog, at least, from the list I provided in my previous post on Blogger Template Directory. The next step after installing your chosen template is to compliment it with adornment such as web widgets to make your blogsite more attractive to your readers and visitors. Remember, aside from useful and unique content, your blog should be, more than anything else, remarkably appealing to the eyes so that readers would find enjoyment in every visit they make in your site.

Yes, an ensemble of applicable, useful and finely crafted widgets wrapped around your site will further add delicious quality in the appearance of your blog and thus would make it more attractive and entice your readers and visitors to keep on visiting it repeatedly. With repeated visits, you are super charging your site. In effect, you will increase your blog popularity.

So, what are you waiting for?

Grab a suitable widget from the list provided below and quickly garnish your blogsite.

Recent Comment/Post - Jackbook, Beta Blogger for Dummies & Widget-Based

Tag/Label Cloud - Phydeaux3, Frivolousmotion & Wilkinsons

Archive Calendar - Phydeaux3, Ecmanaut & Romkas

Web Counter - Sitemeter, Statcounter & Digits

Social Bookmark - Beautiful Beta, Elamb & All About Adsense

Photo Slider/Sharing - Flicker, Picasa & Rockyou

Search Box - Widgetbox, Technojuice & Yahoo

Popular Post - Webweaversworld, Affiliatebrand & Spotplex

Top Commentators - Gosublogger, D' Technology Weblog & Onewebsite

Poll - Tips for New Bloggers, Quimble & PollDaddy

Of course, I am not saying that these are the best widgets you can have. The list is just a guide that you can refer to start the ball rolling.

Now, if you still feel this list is not complete, you can also head to Blogger In Draft to avail of the latest gadgets that are 100% compatible with our very own blogspot.

Wait, you can also try a host of other cool widgets from Widgets Lab.

Again, my friends, if you like you can subscribe to my RSS feeds to receive Stitches™ updates at your convenience in your mailbox.

Read More

Some Cosmetic Enhancements for Stitches™

While on a short "Halloween" vacation, I tried spending my free time toiling around on some cosmetic improvements for my blogsite. The last time I added some goodies was when I posted the Cool Rating Widget. That wasn’t ages ago, though. But I personally and generally like CHANGES; therefore, do not be surprised if "continuous enhancements" will always be one of the dynamic activities of this blog.

Among the new enhancements that I recently implemented here were:

Peek-A-Boo View: I thought of finding a way to make it easy for my readers to go through all my recent posts within the main page of my blog. This is because if the entry is too long (more than 2 or 3 paragraphs), the viewers will find it very hard to quickly locate the topic of interest to them since they need to scroll down a lot. The solution to this, of course, is to show only the summary rather than the entire article in every post. In this way regular and irregular visitors alike can choose which of the recent posts appeal to them the most.

In Peek-A-Boo View the main page will show only post summaries and when you click "Read More", the full post appears in the main page itself. It is also possible for the reader to go back to the summary mode by clicking the "Summary only..." link with which they can collapse the post back to summary.

I managed to find this "post-enhancing" hack from Ramani and Hans. They collaboratively worked on the codes and made them available on their sites.

Social Bookmarking Widget: Social bookmarking, according to Wikipedia, is a way for internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. Social bookmarking, likewise, allows you to suggest something worthy of note to people who share your interests.

Maintaining your bookmarks on a host site allows you to access your favorite websites from anywhere. This makes your bookmarks reachable and always backed-up no matter which computer you use.

Why is this widget important?

If people find the posts you wrote in your blog useful and informative they may want to share it with others. Making it easy for them to recommend and share may bring tremendous visit or steady flow of traffic in your site. Therefore, it makes sense that a widget to bookmark articles in your blog comes in very handy. By bringing in a social bookmarking widget in you site, your visitors can conveniently click on it to submit your site to their favorite Social Bookmarking networks.

I found a solution to this using the hack created by Hans. It is relatively easy to implement and looks very cool and bubbly at the foot of every post. For a working example, you can view the footer of this post.

Tag/Label Cloud Widget: A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Tags are typically listed alphabetically, and tag frequency is shown with font size or color. ^[1] Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.

The advantage of using Tag/Label Clouds is that it takes up a whole lot less vertical space than the default label/category list in Blogger, especially when you have a lot of labels to show. You can also vary the colors & font sizes of the "clouds" according to the number of post in each label/category to make your presentation more enticing.

The codes I used for my label cloud were from phydeaux3. The implementation instructions are very easy to understand. All you have to do is visit his site and follow the procedures very carefully.

There you have it all folks!

Read More

Cool Rating Widget

Widgets are undeniably great tools for website & blogsite designers. They are found everywhere on the net and are almost always free. But one special feature of these gadgets is that they are completely easy to implement and are mostly or absolutely customizable to meet the designers’ demanding requirements of matching their sites look and feel.

Well, for today’s post I decided to share what I have recently came across with while looking for an additional aggregating device for my blog. The cool & exciting widget is called Spotback.


In Amit Kaufman widget review he explained that this control tool provides the power of content rating and recommendation that once was only available to billion-dollar services such as Amazon. From the widget site, this is what they have to say…

Spotback is a personalized rating system that recommends relevant content based on personal rating history using collaborative filtering and aggregated knowledge technologies. When embedding the Spotback technology onto your website you are providing your users a unique personal online experience. When they rate your content, they will immediately be exposed to more relevant content from your website. This results in longer visit lengths, increase in page views and guaranteed user satisfaction.

When you add the Spotback widget to your website or blogsite and allow users to rate everything you publish, your visitors will enjoy personalized recommendations and referrals to additional content on your site. The widget is free, easy to install and guaranteed to improve your online experience and increase page loads.

Spotback provides three widget types - slider (for ratings), stars (for ratings, but different style) and sidebar (for serving related content). The latter of these three also automatically generates tag clouds. All widgets are very customizable so you can match them to your blog or website very easily.

So, what is my verdict? If you are a blogger or one who maintains a site I suggest that you go and get it.

Read More

Archive Calendar

I have been in pain searching for a perfect calendar widget that works with Blogger. Finally, I chanced upon one that is very slick which suits my taste. Phydeaux3 has created the codes and gave along easy to follow instructions. My calendar has been on since 16 September 2007 and has caused me no single trouble in the implementation, despite my complete ignorance on CSS & JavaScript programming.

In addition, he further created a set of variables (whatever it means)/css so you can use the Blogger Font/Color page to pick and choose your calendar look with the WYSIWYG approach, for idiot-proof personal styling.

So, what are you waiting for? Log on to this calendar widget post and see & feel for yourself how straightforward it is to implement the widget.

Meanwhile, I will keep myself tuned at his site to wait for any major development or update on this brilliantly crafted Blogger tool.

Many thanks, phydeaux3, for saving me from my long agony.

Read More