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.

Once I read Andy Beard’s feed update on the latest MyBlogLog widget and seeing how cool-looking it was, I immediately rushed to my MBL dashboard and generated the widget code to add into my blog. Unfortunately, the MBL widget that I used, even after updating it according to the instructions in the MBL page, didn’t work; the new code snippet refused to save itself into the widget form. So now I am still stuck with what MLB calls its crusty old Recent Visitors widget.

If you had the same problem as I have but managed to fix the problem, please let me know how you did it.

UPDATE: The problem has been fixed, thanks to Ian and the MBL team. After Ian mentioned about the fix, I only needed to regenerate the code snippet and paste it in the MBL widget for it to work.

Out goes my Blogsvertise ad, and in comes Entrecard. I initially put up the Blogsvertise ad due to numerous requests to advertise in my blog, but since I don’t want the hassle of managing them, I thought Blogsvertise could do it for me. (Not) surprisingly, I did not get any ad requests after that.

Now, I have seen Entrecard being used in other blogs, prominent and the not-so’s, but I have never thought of incorporating it into my blog. The buzz around Entrecard seemed to be focused more about drawing traffic into their blogs and web sites, an issue which doesn’t matter to me as I’m not really concerned with whether people would read my entries or not, blogging has always just been a passion.

Lately, though, I was beginning to get what Entrecard is more about — networking different site and blog owners to each other by treating their Entrecard accounts as a sort of digital business card that they can drop into their site (I know, I know, Entrecard has been pitching that concept everywhere, but as I said, I only just got it!). And giving free ad space for my blog visitors? Sure, why not?

If you are an Entrecard user, don’t be shy and do drop your Entrecard as often as you wish. Other than through the comments and my MyBlogLog widget,  your Entrecard would be a fun way for me to know who you are. It also means that I have more places to bloghop to later!