Others Online Blog

The making of a good widget

I've recently noticed several good blog posts about what makes a good widget - especially these three - one from Ivan Pope called "Ten Sins of the Widget makers" , one from Stefan Juhl "The 6 Essential Elements of A Great Website Widget" and one from Lawrence Coburn called "Anatomy of a Widget".

Ivan makes several good points about the being well-behaved when being embedded in a web page. The Others Online profile widget started out with essentially the same attitude - the widget should inherit the ambient look and feel of the hosting web page, the publisher of the widget should control the layout, sizing, color and borders to more closely adapt to the layout of their blog or page. One tricky thing which we also addressed was the page load time. The point of the page is to show content, and widgets are secondary, so we decided to delay rendering of profiles until the page has completed loading. Not many other widgets do this and those widgets negatively impact the apparent page load time. I hope widget developers read Ivan's post and take his suggestions to heart - all widgets should be well-behaved widgets and consider the needs of the page author above their own desire to be displayed first.

Lawrence's post talks about the value that a widget should provide to the publisher as well as the features that are valuable to a widget developer. In contrast to one point he raises there is a unique aspect of the Others Online widget - we aren't using our widget super powers to drive traffic back to our site, we are giving this visibility to relevant bloggers.

The comments on these blog posts are also valuable to read - check them out.

Performancing.com disses Snap Preview

This quote from Performancing.com is beautiful!

"Snap's preview anywhere gizmo is ruining the reading experience for millions of people. Its intrusive, obstructive and unuseful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it's useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory."

The comments on their blog were interesting and this was my contribution: I have found the Snap preview to be annoying also. Since I don't want to criticize widget developers in general, all I can say is that I hope they are able to tune it to be useful without being intrusive. One person mentioned that all widgets slow down the page load - but this isn't technically correct. There are a couple ways for a widget developer to delay rendering until after the page is loaded - similar to the way images load after the page is downloaded. I think modern browsers grab images on the fly so the display is faster, but its a similar idea. The trick is for the developer to care enough and be clever enough to do it right. For example, the widget I implemented at Others Online (which is very useful widget for bloggers in general - check it out) draws a simple grey frame then continues with the drawing of profiles after the page is loaded.