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Widgets Live! Followup - YourMinis, Feedburner
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Tuesday, November 7, 2006
1:38:00 PM EST
I am currently sitting in my hotel room, catching up on work (and blogging) until I head over to the Web 2.0 conference (uh, summit) at 1.
Yesterday's conference wrapped up shortly after my final post, with a few "flash demos" - quick five minute presentations of sites, some of which I was already familiar with, some of which I wasn't. The two worthy of some blabber here are Feedburner, and yourminis.
Feedburner offer free statistics tracking for your blog feeds. So while you can use something like StatCounter or MyBlogLog for page views and referrals, those numbers miss out on the people who have signed up for your blog via the feed widget (that dingy thingy in the upper left of your blog that may not even really be a widget by the definition set at yesterday's conference. Whatever). Feedburner will "burn your feed" - redirect your feed URL through their servers in order to can track it - so instead of your blog feed being http://journals.aol.com/stephaniebambam/bambam/atom.xml (or rss.xml) it will be http://feeds.feedburner.com/stephaniebambam. The stats are sweet, but what I really like is the easy way Feedburner lets you promote your blog. The site auto generates codes you can use in e-mail or on your websites that pull the latest headlines from your blog, with one-click to subscribe. Remember how I was whining in a previous post that I was an idiot for not putting my blog address in my e-mail sig? Now, thanks to Feedburner, done. I'd say "yay," but it's way overdue. Seriously, people, if you write a blog and don't have it in your signature, you're a dope. There's no excuse for missing out on that promotion.
The other site I really liked is yourminis. I first discovered this site via SomewhatFrank last week, and immediately thought it was very, very cool. It's a personal homepage site, ala Netvibes or MyYahoo!, but has a few very important differences. First off, it's flash, not AJAX. I couldn't tell you what that means on the technical end of things (better, worse, whatever), but from a user perspective it just means it's pretty and easy to use. You can have multiple tabs - essentially multiple homepages - and it's very easy to add new content to the page via a rail that pops out on the left hand side of the page. Drag and drop, resize, even yank 'em offscreen (oops). There are lots of existing minis there already, comics, feeds, video (AOL Video, in fact), Amazon, Flickr, tons of stuff to play with. And you can share your tabs with other people, either by manually sending off an URL, or through some handy dandy code you can plop onto your website, MySpace, wherever.
There is also a Firefox (or Flock) extension, or IE bookmarklet that lets you superimpose your mini page over any site you may be on (called the "HUD" for Heads Up Display). This is a very big deal, and truly unique. The minis detect the page you're on, allowing you to add content from that page to your mini page, but still letting you interact with the website itself. Make sure to turn off the extension's blinking, though, that drove me bonkers in no time at all.
A desktop version of yourminis is set to launch soon (like Y! Widgets). I'm also waiting for user-created minis to come out, I'm assuming, anyway, they're on the way, it's pretty much standard practice these days.
And there are my two rambling reviews for the morning. If you're at Web 2.0 and notice a (slightly over-enthusiastic - I get a little, um, excited when I see cool stuff) tall girl walking around wearing all black, that's probably me. Come by and say hi!
Technorati tags: BamBam, Feedburner, Web 2.0, widgets live, widgetslive, yourminis
Written by stephaniebambam Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | 
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1:38:00 PM EST
Widgets Live! Followup - YourMinis, Feedburner
Yesterday's conference wrapped up shortly after my final post, with a few "flash demos" - quick five minute presentations of sites, some of which I was already familiar with, some of which I wasn't. The two worthy of some blabber here are Feedburner, and yourminis.
Feedburner offer free statistics tracking for your blog feeds. So while you can use something like StatCounter or MyBlogLog for page views and referrals, those numbers miss out on the people who have signed up for your blog via the feed widget (that dingy thingy in the upper left of your blog that may not even really be a widget by the definition set at yesterday's conference. Whatever). Feedburner will "burn your feed" - redirect your feed URL through their servers in order to can track it - so instead of your blog feed being http://journals.aol.com/stephaniebambam/bambam/atom.xml (or rss.xml) it will be http://feeds.feedburner.com/stephaniebambam. The stats are sweet, but what I really like is the easy way Feedburner lets you promote your blog. The site auto generates codes you can use in e-mail or on your websites that pull the latest headlines from your blog, with one-click to subscribe. Remember how I was whining in a previous post that I was an idiot for not putting my blog address in my e-mail sig? Now, thanks to Feedburner, done. I'd say "yay," but it's way overdue. Seriously, people, if you write a blog and don't have it in your signature, you're a dope. There's no excuse for missing out on that promotion.
The other site I really liked is yourminis. I first discovered this site via SomewhatFrank last week, and immediately thought it was very, very cool. It's a personal homepage site, ala Netvibes or MyYahoo!, but has a few very important differences. First off, it's flash, not AJAX. I couldn't tell you what that means on the technical end of things (better, worse, whatever), but from a user perspective it just means it's pretty and easy to use. You can have multiple tabs - essentially multiple homepages - and it's very easy to add new content to the page via a rail that pops out on the left hand side of the page. Drag and drop, resize, even yank 'em offscreen (oops). There are lots of existing minis there already, comics, feeds, video (AOL Video, in fact), Amazon, Flickr, tons of stuff to play with. And you can share your tabs with other people, either by manually sending off an URL, or through some handy dandy code you can plop onto your website, MySpace, wherever.
There is also a Firefox (or Flock) extension, or IE bookmarklet that lets you superimpose your mini page over any site you may be on (called the "HUD" for Heads Up Display). This is a very big deal, and truly unique. The minis detect the page you're on, allowing you to add content from that page to your mini page, but still letting you interact with the website itself. Make sure to turn off the extension's blinking, though, that drove me bonkers in no time at all.
A desktop version of yourminis is set to launch soon (like Y! Widgets). I'm also waiting for user-created minis to come out, I'm assuming, anyway, they're on the way, it's pretty much standard practice these days.
And there are my two rambling reviews for the morning. If you're at Web 2.0 and notice a (slightly over-enthusiastic - I get a little, um, excited when I see cool stuff) tall girl walking around wearing all black, that's probably me. Come by and say hi!
Technorati tags: BamBam, Feedburner, Web 2.0, widgets live, widgetslive, yourminis
Written by stephaniebambam Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | digg this
This entry has 4 comments: (Add your own)
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And why, exactly, are you a dope, Dan? :)
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Stephanie,
Thanks so much for your comments...I am actually at web 2.0 if you want to try to hook up and I can share with you some of the things we will be doing with yourminis.
We are very excited about the release and have a lot more in store...you can email me at alex@yourminis.com
alex bard
ceo
goowy
11/8/06 10:50 AM
For example, in college I made a hot ham and cheese sandwich IN my toaster because I was just too damn lazy to work the stove. Unfortunately, I forgot to account for gravity, and all the cheese leaked out. See? Dope.
I could go on and on, but why? I embrace my dopiness, and I wear it like a badge of honor. :)
Chow,
Dan