 | About No Smoking This is a very simple widget that gives you a count of the number of days that it’s been since you’ve stopped smoking. You enter the date that you last had a cigarette and it displays the number of days that have passed since then on top of a No Smoking sign. Optionally you can now enter how much you typically spend per day and it will display how much money you have saved as well. |
| About No Smoking This is a very simple widget that gives you a count of the number of days that it’s been since you’ve stopped smoking. You enter the date that you last had a cigarette and it displays the number of days that have passed since then on top of a No Smoking sign. Optionally you can now enter how much you typically spend per day and it will display how much money you have saved as well. |
The best part of the Sunny widget is that the developers at BIG Interactive really took advantage of our platform, building in some features that are only available when the widget is downloaded. So while the online widget is cool, only users who grab it as a download get the full experience. | About No Smoking This is a very simple widget that gives you a count of the number of days that it’s been since you’ve stopped smoking. You enter the date that you last had a cigarette and it displays the number of days that have passed since then on top of a No Smoking sign. Optionally you can now enter how much you typically spend per day and it will display how much money you have saved as well. |
A large number of blogs and other sites now use Feedburner as it has a number of great Pro freatures and Feedburner also allows you to transfer feed ownership between users. Whilst you can see your stats in Feedburner the graphs are not that great and you can compare them.
There is a site called Feed Compare that allows you to view the RSS subscriber data for up to 4 feeds on a single graph. This means you could compare your competitors RSS subscriber count with your own feed.
To allow you to get a better idea of subscriber numbers you can also view a graph showing data for the last month, quarter, half year, year or 2 years assuming the feed has been in existence for that long.
The reason this is such a great tool is that you can now find out exactly how a sites RSS feed has grown over time. All you need is the sites Feedburner URL which you can get by right clicking on the sites RSS feed icon and copying the URL than pasting it into Feed Compare.
This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.
Here are the trends for September. The first graph shows the evolution of the ranking for the top 10 social bookmarking services. We can clearly see the sudden rise of Facebook to the 4th position in September. Another interesting path is the one traced by Live, who was initially in the 6th position, was pushed down to the 8th position by Reddit and StumbleUpon in April, and then went back up all the way to the 4th position in July pushing down Digg and MyWeb.
As expect, September’s mover is Facebook, going from 5% in August to 7.1% in September. Delicious however lost a little bit of traction. Favorites (browser bookmarking) have also increased, but this is mostly due to the fact that Favorites are now also included in the drop-down widget.
Google Reader continues to grow and lead the feed reader market (up 1.4%) while MyYahoo and Bloglines are standing still. The mover for September is Live, which moved up 2%.
To see more trends, click here.
Top Social Bookmarking/Sharing - Ranking Over Time
Top Social Bookmarking/Sharing - September 2007
Top Feed Readers - September 2007
 | About Production Paradise Search Widget With the Production Paradise Widget the world’s finest visual media professionals are at your fingertips. |
 | About Sizzling Classic 45s Each 45 published in the widget includes the artist, title and label, as well as the year of issue. It also shows the record condition and price. For many of our new records, the widget displays a detailed description and commentary on the music, as well as a scan of the record label or picture sleeve. Click on the song title to see the detail info, and click “Return To List” to see the full list of the latest 30 or so records. To visit Classic 45s, click on the song title when viewing the detailed info. |
Just choose the widget you are interested in, configure it however you like it to look and function and then select the Google icon in the share it box. 
Read MoreYou've all seen the little FeedBurner subscriber counters on sites that display a site or more often a blogs number of RSS subscribers. Whilst this is a nice widget to display on your site there isn't much in the way of customizing to display something different.
Plaint text subscriber count
There is a way to display the number of readers you have for your feed by using FeedBurners API. This means you can display your subscriber count within some text, for example as part of a blog post. You could also have a separate message somewhere on you site saying X number of readers subscribe to this site.
You can use the PHP code below. You need to have PHP5 otherwise the SimpleXMLElement command will not work.
//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=YourFeedburnerFeedLinkHere";
//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();
//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);
//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);
//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
//end get cool feedburner count
?>
The next line of PHP needs to be located where you want the subscriber count number to appear. This code needs to occur after the code above for it to work.
I borrowed this code from Mark over at 45n5 so thanks Mark.
This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.
 | About CurrencyConverter Easily calculate currency conversions between more than 190 world currencies, plus all the old legacy European currencies, some world legacy currencies and even unrecognized currencies and virtual currencies (like the Linden Dollar from Second Life). - Automatically updated exchange rates - Support for almost all the traded currencies of the world - Support the old legacy european currencies (like Italian lira, Deutsch mark, French francs) - Support multi currencies conversions (you can add all the currencies you want to the conversion table) - Support inverse conversion (just type an * before the value to convert to enter the inverse mode) - Support math expression evaluation: just enter a simple math expression and the result will be converted - Support multiple widget instances, so that you can keep open more than a conversion table, each with a set of preferred currencies - You can choose the desired decimal precision, from one to five decimals - You can choose your preferred interface theme - The widget displays the currencies signs and the country flag - Added support to the computation of the exchange taxes - Localized in English, Italian, Portuguese, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, Greek, Serbian, Polish, Traditional Chinese and Japanese (all the currency names are localized, too). |
 | About xCuts A utility for looking up Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts, something that recent switchers from Linux or Windows probably need to do quite a bit! This widget lets you easily browse or search the contents of its MySQL-powered database, which it accesses over the web using Ajax. The xCuts are organized by Category, Scope, and Object, and you can even drill down to a second cross-referenced level if you need to. Or just use the fast live search form. xCuts includes tips on the use of certain shortcuts, and it’s designed to let you copy and paste shortcuts to external documents. This resizable widget uses the terrific Script.aculo.us effects library to work its visual magic. When you’re done, click the title to compact xCuts down to a tiny lozenge for later use. |
A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation.
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
Posted in Blogging Tips������
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
Posted in Blogging Tips������ RSS is now one of the most valuable metrics on the net. Increasing your RSS subscriber count is a measurable way to show the popularity of your site. As RSS is an opt in way for readers to view your site contents, they can easily stop being a subscriber at any time.
It shows how far RSS has come when John Chow and Shoemoney start a competition to see who can get the most new subscribers in a month. Notice how it wasn't a competition to get the most traffic or the most subscribers to an email list but who can get the most RSS subscribers.
Why RSS subscribers
John and Shoe are both canny marketers and know the value of RSS. RSS is a transparent metric that shows a loyal readership. If a site starts to slide in it's content then readers will no longer subscribe. They would rather gain an RSS subscriber than an extra visitor.
Whilst the challenge is a bit of fun there is also a serious reason John and Shoe have gotten together to run this little competition. At the end of the competition they will both have a larger loyal subscriber base. This competition has gained them a large number of new subscribers which generally means more revenue for them.
This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.
In A Rubric for Social Media Expertise, Liz Strauss is exploring how we use social media for our blogs and our businesses, especially how we organize and structure social media to work for us.
As the living web begins to seamlessly integrate into our concrete cultures and as our lives become globally intertwined, businesses are beginning to investigate what this means. Though the idea of markets as conversations may have started with Cluetrain ten years ago, but it has only become business credible with the advent of what we’re calling Web 2.0 and social media.
In recent years, major enterprise, telcos, cablecoms, and mainstream media have found more reason than not to look at social web models as unsound. Meanwhile we’ve been exploring concepts such as influence, authority, transparency, permission marketing, and experimenting with social media tools and networks to understand how a customer-centered market actually works.
Part of her work in developing educational standards for writing social media training materials, Liz explains that we are walking down a totally new path of economics and marketing which is returning to the “culture of a village” and changing the whole marketplace. You can watch from the outside or jump in - either way, you have to understand that this is the same as business techniques of the past while being totally different. In her words, “Can you spell paradox?”
She takes it even further with a quiz in Have You Organized Your Social Media Thinking Lately?
As we are all questioning where social media is taking us, and how much we should invest in the various types and forms, it’s time to organize your thinking around social media.
The keyword of the three day Blog World Expo event a couple weeks ago in Las Vegas was social. People were desperate to understand how to connect via the web with their customers and potential customers, and how to build the networks they so desperately need to build their business - yet they don’t understand how it works, why it works, and what will work specifically for them.
Are you questioning all that time you are spending on Twitter, fixing up your Facebook page, requesting LinkedIn connections, and trying to be all things to all social services and networks? Is it really working for you? Or are you spending a lot of time being social without the return on the time investment? Where should you really be putting your social energy?
When I was planning for my college options, I struggled with two challenging realizations. A higher education was important. I needed to take the basics and quickly move down my chosen educational path to secure my future career. Yet, I realized that all the knowledge in the world won’t help you when it is who you know not what you know that makes the difference. While I could get the basics of a great education at a community college or lessor known college, making connections with a sorority and my fellow students at a well-known, established (expensive) university were connections that would last a lifetime. Understanding that the relationships made during those crucial university years may benefit me more than the education itself helps move me in that direction.
The same applies in the online world. It’s the relationships formed through the social media that help you with your work and life, not just what you learn from the experience.
Maybe it’s time you started re-thinking about this new social world we live in to make wiser choices.
We’re becoming a global village. Who are your neighbors? Who have you been chatting across the virtual picket fence lately?
Site Search Tags: liz strauss, social media, social networking, social network, social, network, connections, business, business of blogging, blog business
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.
