Others Online Blog

Update to the Widget Wizard

We've been getting good feedback from our early beta users of the profile widget and have incorporated a few suggestions. The biggest change has added support to the widget to choose whether to show which keywords match with the profiles found or to show interests from the profiles found. This is useful when you use a tag to create an ad-hoc grouping of people - like "2000bloggers" - and if that is the only keyword used for search, displaying that on every profile isn't all that interesting. But showing the user's interests is, uh, well, interesting.

Another change was to support "curved borders", but this only changes the display in the Firefox web browser. It doesn't mess up Internet Explorer, but the widget will just have the standard square corners. We'll have to wait until CSS3 is implemented before a simple approach like this works across all web browsers.

These changes are available via the widget wizard and you'll need to re-publish the widget to your blog to see the effect.

Update to Web Site

Ok, so hopefully it won't bite us in the ass, but we've decided to open up the widget and Firefox toolbar to the world today. People keep writing about us, and I just thought we should put what we've got out there and see what happens, even though we still don't have a lot of the critical pieces together.

People, please be kind to us! We're just getting started and the next couple months will bring about some very exciting news/features that will add significant value to our users -- much more value than we offer today.

New Widget Designs and Wizard

Mike publlished a handy dandy new "widget wizard" today, along with 3 new formats. We're not yet done with Web site edits, so it isn't publicized on our site, but we do pitch it to new users on the last page of registration. Speaking of that last page, that has been overhauled too. GAWD, it was just horrible -- looks much nicer now. We love comments and feedback!

Here are screenshots of the new widget designs:

      

Thanks for the Blog Posts!

I want to thank each of the following bloggers for writing about Others Online, in addition to joining!

• Rantings of a Deranged Entrepreneur
• VueRoyale, in the Netherlands
• Wake Me Now
• JonesPC
• 2000 Bloggers