Friday, February 9, 2007 at 5:27PM Valentine's Day is nearly upon us we hope you're prepared. Here's a handy checklist:
Friday, February 9, 2007 at 4:03PM Our thanks goes to Feedster, blog search leader, for putting the Widgetbox blidget badge on their front door. Now all of the thousands of bloggers coming to Feedster can discover the easiest way to turn their blog into a widget. Feedster adds a lot of value to the blogosphere, and especially their excellent enterprise-level solutions for businesses. Check out their Feedster Feedpapers. It’s an effective way to sift through the staggering amounts of new information the web is generating every second. And, you can explore all this dynamic content through their Content Channels. We’re hoping all of those bloggers on Feedster will build blidgets. Thanks Feedster!
Tuesday, February 6, 2007 at 12:03PM We’ve seen a great response since we introduced blidgets. In just a few days more than a thousand bloggers have turned their blogs into widgets. Thousands of people have subscribed to these blidgets, installing them on their own blogs and web pages and MySpace profiles. The owners of these blidgets are tracking their spread across the internet with our free Widgetbox Syndication Metrics. We appreciate all the bloggers out there blidgetizing! We also appreciate the support from the industry. Om Malik was the first to create a blidget, and the reviews have been favorable. Alex Iskold posted a review in Read/Write Web:
Yet, what Widgetbox has done is important in the grand scheme of pushing the widgetization of the web forward. Widgetbox has started what we believe is going to become a trend - an end-to-end thinking about widgets.And we couldn’t agree more with Alex on the following, since it’s central to our mission:
Once the process of creating and displaying the widgets is super easy, we will have succeeded in remixing the web at large.Lawrence Coburn also posted a blidget review in Sexy Widget. We echo his sentiments that:
... the Blidget tool makes it easy to add an image to your widget, which can be helpful for branding or presentation purposes.Blidgets are driving syndication for bloggers, but we also believe there are many promotional and marketing applications for blidgets and other personal expression widgets. What’s next on the radar for blidgets? We don’t want to say exactly, but we’ve got an aggressive roadmap. And we’ve been actively listening to the feedback and suggestions – hundreds in the last few days alone! Please let us know what you think. We almost always get back to you with a real live human response.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007 at 9:58AM Just a note that our widget gallery has been intermittently slow for the last few days because of the unexpectedly huge number of new widgets due to our new blidget feature. We have a fix and are in the final phases of extensively testing it. It should go live this afternoon and restore performance to the usual snappy level that you know and love from Widgetbox. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience. We've been working around the clock to restore performance.
Thursday, February 1, 2007 at 10:08AM Blogger.com and all the blogs on BlogSpot have had intermittant problems all morning and are completely down right now — hitting Blogger's front door variously gives a 502 error or a "down for maintenance" message.
This has exposed a flaw in our new Blidgets feature: bad error reporting. When people try to create a Blidget from their Blogger blog, it fails but doesn't give an error about the underlying site and RSS feed being down.
Sorry for the confusion and inconvenience. We are aware of the problem and implementing better messages right now.
Update 10:20am: Blogger seems to be back up and you can again create BlogSpot blidgets.