My sidebar still has the MyBlogLog widget hanging around. It’s mostly for the benefit of visitors who are MyBlogLog users; it gives their sites or blogs the extra exposure by allowing people to click on their avatars and visit their sites.

But I don’t use MyBlogLog anymore. It’s probably been half a year since I logged in, and half a year in this digital age is a very long time.

Why did I start using MyBlogLog? I thought it would be an easy way to build my blog community around it.

The problem is, I didn’t intend WebGrrrl.net to be a place for me to network; this blog is merely a place for me to share what I discover and learn. Over time, I guess this blog did kind of gotten a life of its own, and a little build-up of followers seemed to be a natural way of its evolving to be what it is today.

Like many other social bookmarking / networking sites, using MyBlogLog is hard work if you’re counting on it to bring traffic to your blog. Think about this though: do you spend more time online searching for information and solving problems, or do you spend more time networking with people?

If you’re looking for answers to your problems, a service like MyBlogLog might not be the first thing that comes to mind — you’d be going straight to the Big G or the Yoddeling search engine and do you stuff from there. However, if you can spare the time and really do enjoy connecting with other people, then you should definitely continue to work the MyBlogLog sites and such.

When it comes down to it, I’m just as happy blogging for the sake of blogging. It’s great to know new people, but I don’t necessarily need to. I’ll still keep the MBL widget, though, as a courtesy to my blog visitors. Giving back links are always a nice to do.

Yes, and finally it’s version 1.0. It’s a small update, but one which can improve the sidebar layout if you have been affected by it. The latest version fixes the extra tag that appears on all other pages when Show In Home Only is selected. Thanks to Ulquiorra for reporting the bug.

Download Top Commentators widget v.1.0 now.

Some of you who have visited my site since a couple of weeks ago may have noticed the Tip Me (Scratchback) widget that I added in the sidebars. Yes, you don’t see it anymore, I’ve removed it. I suppose there’s no point, really, in using that widget if you want to get backlinks from my site. since all you have to do is comment on my post and your link automatically appears in my Top Commentators list. The only difference between the Tip Me and Top Commentators in terms of link visibility is the fact that Tip Me appears site-wide, whereas the Top Commentators links appear only on the home page of WebGrrrl.net.

I installed the ScratchBack widget to see whether I can really make money out of it. I probably should have promoted it a bit by posting about it; on the other hand, since I was only experimenting with it, it wasn’t a big deal anyway. I started off with a $5 tip per link, then lowered it to $2 a link, and still no buyer. Looks like Scratchback isn’t as effective as Text Link Ads or Linkworth if you’re meaning to use it as a way to sell links in your site. At least with the latter two, they do the work of looking for advertisers on your behalf, while with Scratchback, you may have to work extra hard to convince people to buy your links.

Bloghopping through my MyBlogLog visitors led me to a cute little plugin called ClickComments by PostReach. Instead of typing out their comments, your blog visitors can instead click on an icon representing how good your particular post is.

This plugin can be supported in many types of blogging platform such as Blogger, MovableType and of course WordPress. Even the setup looks fairly easy to use. You just need to fill in the form on the right-side of ClickComments’ web site with your blog URL (which is the only compulsory field to fill), and select the style you preferred when your plugin appears in your site. The icons representing the comments can be as simple as two icons representing I Like It / Don’t Like It, to as many as six icons representing Cool / Fun / Insightful / Fell Asleep / I’m Confused / I Disagree.

I suppose this may be a good alternative to using ratings on your posts, but this may not totally replace the traditional comment form that we’re used to. For one thing, the inability for the plugin to record your commentors’ URL would put off some people from commenting for the sake of backlinking (thus avoiding spams, yeay! ). Also, ClickComments may not fit your need if you are looking at your comments section as a community-building platform.

On top of that, the plugin design and icons are still very limited to those options you see in the form. Maybe one of these days ClickComments will have the ability for its users to customize not just the plugin look, but also the types of icons that can be used so that the plugin can be customized to fit a particular blog’s persona or theme.

I was this close to putting this widget into my blog, if not for that fact that my recent web hosting predicament caused me to be aware of my blog’s loading time and avoid anymore plugin and widget add-ins (although the plugins did not cause my problem). I may use something like this in the future or for my other sites.

I am in the midst of updating the Top Commentators Widget, and have a few changes in mind for this:

1. Modifying commentator queries based on e-mail addresses instead of URLs. I have read a few posts currently in the Web about how Top Commentators plugin can be hijacked by spammers, by way of typing in legitimate site URLs of honest commentators in a particular blog, then possibly inserting the spamming URL in the content of a comment. The suggested fix to this issue is to do queries of top commentators based on e-mail addresses, which are hidden from comments (as is most often practiced). I have suggested a fix that does just that in one of the comments of the Top Commentators Widget, but I have not tested it extensively. I’ll be doing so before releasing the next version of this widget.
2. Fixing the unclickable form fields in the Control Form. There’s only one, really, that I have identified as problematic, and that is the “Specify number of days” field under the reset period. The problem is apparently caused by the label tag wrapping around both the reset period and reset day fields. I have redone that part in my current test.
3. Option to list only commentators with URLs.
4. Fix the exclude URLs field, which seems to not work the way it suppose to.
5. (Added 4/Mar/08) Option to display or not display comment count.
6. (Added 11/Mar/08) Option to set NoFollow on all links in the list.

There were a few more issues I would like to fix but which may be out of my control. For example, a few commented that changes were not reflected even when saved (this could be permissions issues or browser not refreshed after changes were applied), and the control form not showing at all (certain browsers can’t display the JavaScript-and-CSS-based form properly; you may want to try using a different browser just to make sure).

If you’re currently using the widget and have anything else to add before the update is released (probably end of March), please use the comment form in this post, instead of the widget home post, and I’ll see what I can do with the request.