June 29th, 2007, 2 Comments »
We recently worked with the good people at Biro Creative to create an Apple desktop widget (and a Windows Vista gadget) for DeSmogBlog:
Our widget displays current DeSmogBlog news. Plus, it’s got a counter that shows the planet’s estimated accumulated carbon footprint since January 1, 2007.
To be honest, I didn’t think it’d be all that successful. The news is cool, but as for the counter, who wants a depressing reminder of planetary degradation on their desktop?
That shows how sound my instincts are. Yesterday I submitted it to Apple’s widget site, and today it’s the featured widget on the home page (screenshot for posterity). Sweet.
Of course, I’ll never be able to replicate that feat. Who knows why our widget got chosen? Maybe there’s a sandal-wearing environmentalist running Apple’s widget library? The odds favour it.
Speaking of environmentalism, check out this skewering of the US Senate’s absurd new ethanol legislation.
2 Comments »
June 19th, 2007, 4 Comments »
I used to really obsess over my web stats. I’ve managed to reduce that obsession to a casual curiosity, focussed almost entirely on who’s linking to me. That makes it sound like a popularity contest. In truth, it’s more that I’ve just exhausted any interest in knowing how many people found this site by searching for “cheeses of nazareth” in the last month (13, in case you were curious).
I’m most interested in the linkers because they represent actual, knowable humans who have opinions and perspectives. So, the ’stats’ engine I check most regularly is Technorati, followed by occasional peaks at HitTail. I’ve emailed the folks at HitTail asking for a setting that enables me to filter out all of the search engine traffic from their results. But that’s basically the opposite of their messaging, so I doubt they’ll go for it.
Having recently upgraded to Mac OS 10.4 (I know, I know), I’ve been exploring the wonderful world of desktop widgets. I’m not using anything particularly out of the ordinary–currency converter, weather, FTP and so forth.
I’d like a widget that talks to Google Analytics or HitTail or whoever, and shows a real-time stream of visitors and their source URLs (and enables me to filter out all the search engine noise). Maybe one already exists, but I haven’t been able to find it.
Which widgets do you use regularly and love?
UPDATE: You know, I just looked at my web stats–specifically the most popular keywords that searchers used to find this site. I observed an interesting trend: comparing the top fifty keywords from May, 2006 to May, 2007, only one keyword appears in both lists. What can we attribute that to? My short attention span? The Google dance?
4 Comments »
