Thursday, November 20, 2008

A Few New Features and Plans for the Future


As some of you may have noticed, I have replaced the Grazr widget that I used to display the latest blog updates with a new method. The Grazr widget was great, and is a more user friendly method for displaying blog updates, yet it only allowed me to list 50 blogs. I would like to thank Mindfield, who runs the Xchannel aggregator for introducing me to the Google Feed Ajax API, which is the script used to display the updates. It will allow me to list updates for every blog on the list. As of yet, I've only managed to add a few dozen blogs, but I will work my way through the entire list over the next few days.

I'm still not entirely pleased with the appearance of it though, yet my javascript skills are rather weak, so I will have to need further assistance before I can make any more modifications. I plan to increase the amount of text from each post that is displayed, and list the title of the blog instead of the post author, as I'm sure more of you are familiar with blog titles rather than their respective authors. If you're familiar with javascript and willing to help me out, please leave a comment.

I also plan to overhaul the custom search engine that I created. I just recently found out that more people are using it than I realized, so I will do my best to make it more user friendly. I will be adding more sources to search, changing the appearance, and possibly integrate it directly into the blog so that you don't have to exit the page.

The last bit of news I would to announce is that I have created a new button for the blogroll. The old button looked nice, but it gave one little clue as to the purpose of the site. I think the new version does a much better job of that. If you are currently displaying a button for the blogroll on your site, please replace it with the updated button. The new button can be found below, and if you need the code to display it click here. For future reference, you can find the button and code on the main menu where is reads "Show Your Support". I would like to know what you think of the recent changes, and the possible new features. Please leave a comment.





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