I've Been Outed Again As A Slob: This Time A Widget Slob!

I will be honest.  When it comes to tagging, I'm Felix, not Oscar.  Not only have I confessed this on my blog, but I went as far to compare tag sloppiness to car slopiness.  And one colleague, the ever so brilliant, Alexandra Samuels agreed and came to the rescue with some tips to help tidy up my tag collection.

My digital sloppiness has a long history.   Back in the earlier days of Internet publishing (circa 1994-5), UNIX programmer types used to cruise my Arts Wire SpiderSchool instructional web pages and point out to me that in line 24 of code I forgot a quote mark or even worse that I had made a typo in the text. Maybe I should have reacted to this with total shame.  On the other hand, I thought the immediate feedback was a wonderful thing: It helped me improve the pages. So I decided to encourage it with the Typo Police page.  I invited my readers to be copy editors, point out mistakes, and earn a typo police badge.  What happened is that many English teachers and copy editors took up the challenge!

And, last week I was outed as a widget slob by another well-respected blogger no less!.   During the last few weeks of widget experimentation, I had installed (and unstalled) quite a few widgets on my blog.  Yes, it got messy.  Even worse, it cause some slow loading of my content.   So, I asked the commenter for some advice and did a little reflecting on my own and cleaned things up a bit. 

Here's the criteria I came up with for whether or not you keep a widget installed or not:

-Does it help you generate traffic?
-Does it add value to your blog content or for your readers?
-Does have the ability to encourage more conversation or comments?
-How much does it contributes to slow loading?

The latter is a technical issue that Stephen Downes provided more advice about: 

What I would get rid of is:

- anything in Flash, especially if it comes from another site
- other things that come from other sites.

If you do keep stuff hat comes from other sites, it is important that they load last.  They should be at the bottom of your page (the bottom of the HTML; it doesn't matter where it actually appears).

I also noticed that adding embedded video players to my blog posts also seemed to slow things down.

Comments

[Bridget Murphy]

Hi Beth,

The Dunn County Community Visioning Project (DCCV) is one of the lucky recipients of a Case Foundation MIYO grant.

The DCCV project asks citizens what they value in their community and what they would like to preserve and change. Through scenario planning, research and dialogue these common views and dreams of the whole community are shaped into a plan which becomes the foundation for strategic direction.

I was referred to your blog by an associate at Lipman Hearne… he referenced your enthusiastic support of America's Giving Challenge and suggested I ask if you would consider posting my voting widget on your blog.

If you have any questions please feel free to email or phone me at:

608.695.4196

I very much appreciate your attention to this matter!

Kind regards,

Bridget Murphy