Others Online Blog

Widget Changes (Not Due to Halloween)

You might have noticed that our widget started looking a little different today. No, it's not dressed up for halloween (despite the horror therein), we're just playing around with different things to say on it and seeing what works best. For instance:

• Instead of our logo up top, we're displaying "Related People". To me it feels more appropriate to say "Relevant People" but then we've been seeing "Related Posts" in different blogs so maybe people understand "related" better than "relevant"?
• Below that title is "(hover over profiles)", just in case viewers don't realize all the fly-out goodness that exists when you hover your mouse over a profile.
• Instead of "Tag yourself. Be found." at the bottom, we have "Join now. Show here." Clever, huh?
• Oh yeah, and sometime last week you may have noticed the "Powered by Others Online" way down at the bottom.

Since we measure widget interaction (fly-outs, profile views and clicks) in order to report that info to our cherished users, we'll be able to see if this helps better drive traffic to users' profiles and sites. Expect to see small changes to these text areas over the coming weeks -- advertisers call this A-B testing. We're also playing around with different widget designs, but still not happy with anything.

Any ideas? Any feedback? Let fly.

Widgets and web site performance

We've been watching the use of widgets all across the web - in blogs and in traditional website - and an occasional question pops up regarding performance and whether a widget will slow down the display of a page. There aren't a lot of resources on the web that do a good job describing the situation and providing suggestions. Nial Kennedy has a fairly technical post on widget performance. The only really useful information is reduce total network requests - which basically means put multiple blocks of javascript into one file and multiple blocks of CSS into one file. This post about using fancy javascript to create widgets is on the right track, but really is meant for widget developers rather than widget users. Other sites that talk about web page performance actually have an incorrect understanding of how to achieve good performance, so I won't link to them here.

However, there are several tools that can help you see what your blog page performance is and provide a starting point to determining what to change - if anything. This full page test tool from Pingdom is very cool. It visually shows you all the files that a browser would load when someone views your site and gives you the actual download times.

A Special Invite to Political Bloggers

Over the coming weeks we'll be launching the Others Online widget across a number of sites, and we hope to have many thoughtful, authentic and interesting bloggers to introduce to our users. It's a quid pro quo -- the more quality bloggers we have that join our service, the better the widget works and the more traffic it generates for them.

One "category" we're particularly interested in is politics. If you have a thoughtful political blog and want to be considered for our pilot program, please register and/or leave a comment here. It's pretty simple, you let us promote your blog on a targeted basis -- if we do it well, then you get a lot more visibility and we'll use you as an example in PR, web site quotes, etc. If we do it poorly, then the feedback is even more valuable.

Here (in my opinion) are examples of quality political blogs (left and right) that I'd love to share with our users:

• The Seminal -- recent graduates of Northwestern who used to write about hip-hop but transitioned to full-time contribution to the political blogosphere.
• TalkLeft -- Jeralyn is a criminal defense attorney who provides liberal coverage of crime-related political and injustice news.
• WhiteHouser.com -- Fred is an attorney, entrepreneur and write passionate about politics and religion. It shows!
• Politics in the Zeros -- Bob knows that politics is about money, and there are a lot of zeros in politics, hence the name.
• Seeing the Forest -- Dave the founder has got one helluva bio.
• Right Side of Tech -- Russ is a technologist who provides his conservative views on politics and technology.
• Conservatism with Heart -- How does Dee get so much done? She's got passion.
• Confessions of a Closet Republican -- great title!

Welcome TypePad Bloggers!

Yesterday the Others Online widget was posted to the TypePad widget gallery and since then we've had a number of new users. We've tried to take a look at each of the blogs who added our widget, in order to make sure all is working well, but it's possible we missed some. If so, please leave us a comment here or send us an email to support AT othersonline DOT com!