I added two new blog widgets.
FireStats - seen first on Dr. Rob’s blog. Very cool. Allows me to keep track of visitors based on various criteria (country, operating system, browser) from my WordPress Dashboard.
sitemeter gives the same information (probably more), but I have to visit my account at sitemeter to view the information.
FireStats can be customized to allow some of the information to be displayed as icons alongside the visitor’s name when they comment on a post.
I’ve activated it to know who among the commenters are:
- other Mac users
- and IE users
The other widget is a customizable welcome message from IP2Phrase.com which you will see on my left side bar just under the Firefox-putting-the-bite-on-IE image (Thank you for the great image, Moof).
I would like to have some feedback from visitor(s) to know if your location is correctly displayed in my welcome message.
And please take a few seconds to answer the new poll on the right sidebar. Thank you.
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Hi Vijay,
I saw your welcome message once I remembered to tell NoScript to allow it.
Hmm, what does it know that I don’t. It wished me a great day in Aldershot… I’m not planning to travel to Aldershot (about 60 miles away) today or any time in the future as far as I know.
I know it’s probably due to strange routing of internet connections, but it was good for a laugh. Anyone else ‘travelling’ today?
Regards,
Ian
Ian, Thanks for the prompt reply.
Two different ISPs, probably different routings.
When I see my blog at home, it wishes me a good day in Salem, India.
When I see it in my hospital office (about half a kilometer or 0.3 miles to you), it wishes me a good day in Chennai, which is about 300 km (187 m) from here.
So I traveled 300 km virtually from my home to office
Isn’t technology wonderful.
Another very cool plugin (and addictive as well) is one called LIVE. It allows you to watch live as people visit your site and as rss readers hit your site as well. I still can’t get the plugin for the tag buttons to work on my blog. I don’t know why, but they just don’t seem to like me.
I don’t live in Langley BC, that’s about 50 Km away and no one outside of the Lower Mainland has ever heard of it. I think it’s a really neat thing however, just wish it was correct. Trust Rob to find all that good stuff, but his site is so full, it takes forever to load. It’s the slowest one I visit except for one other which is also loaded to the gills with stuff you could go make coffee.
I have a question for you. How do you expand the number of avatars you can see on mybloglog? I only have 5, you have 10, one site I visit has 30 displayed. Now 10 would satisfy me, but I can’t see how to edit it. Any advice gratefully appreciated.
I’ll have to check out these widgets, I got three new weather ones via Ian (no one is not enough). I do love the toys, on the other hand I do like the a relatively clean template.
JMB,
You have to do a bit of customization to get 10 recent visitors instead of the default five that MyBlogLog offers.
It may be different for Blogger.
This is how I did it for my WordPress self-hosted blog.
Go to the My Home page at MyBlogLog.
Click on the ‘Get Widgets’ icon that is beneath the screen shot of your blog.
Scroll down a bit to get to the Recent Readers (tracking script is included) part.
There are options to change the colors of the heading, link background, link and bottom background, the width of the sidebar widget, show screen names, Image size, rows & title…. followed by a button to preview and get code.
I changed the background and text colors to match my blog and set the width to 150 px, set show screen names to yes, image size to half-size and set the rows to 10 (customizable from 1 to 10; default 5), entered “Recent Readers” as the title and hit the button to get the code. I copied the generated html code into a text file. Copied that into one of the available text widgets for the customizable sidebar in my WordPress theme. Saved the Options. and loaded my blog to get what you see currently in my sidebar.
It may be different for Blogger. I don’t know how much of customization you can do to your sidebar. But if Blogger allows you to add text widgets, this is entirely possible.
Good Luck
So how do I speed up my blog? I am eternally frustrated at the slowness issue, yet I am not sure why it is so slow.
Rob,
I’m flattered that you asked though. You are in a roundabout-sort-of-way a sort of blog god-parent - similar to Moof. I copy a lot of stuff that you both do or implement in your blogs.
Your blog loads faster in my browser than my own!!
I don’t think I’m the right person to answer your question
I appreciate the compliment. I Ended up cutting back on some of my plugins to see if I could speed things up. It’s hard for me to tell.
Your blog has plenty of your own flavor in it. I think we all look to other bloggers’ stuff and try to maximize our own. Your stuff stands just great on its own.
Rob
My welcome message is this:
“Thanks for visiting
I hope you have a great day in CHENNAI, INDIA”
And I do live in Chennai, so no issues there ! Vijay, did’nt know you worked in Chennai
Next time we need a radiologist, we will drop in 
To answer the question on speeding up the loading of a blog: one easy way is to remove as many external scripts as possible out of it…of course, one will loose the cool functionality of these scripts, but then you have a faster loading blog on the other hand…
if you wanna test this premise, without removing any of them, simply switch on the “No Script” and load your blog in FireFox to see the difference (BTW, I do it every time I come to Vijay’s blog
)
(again, seems I am putting some spoilers on the fun of testing out new plugins and scripts; sorry)
Arunn,
I guess you meant disabling Java & Javascript when you said “Switching on No Script.” That is the only option with the word script in the Mac version of Firefox.
While it took away some of the stuff like the MyBlogLog recent reader box, it made no perceptible difference to the loading speed. And it didn’t make any difference for Rob’s site either.