Cleaning up

Well here we are in February already and without having made the slightest New Year’s Resolution I managed to post on every single day last month. Yay for me!

I also tried quite a lot of things here too. Twitter, MyBlogLines, The Flickr widget, Snap and CoComment.

MyBloglines sits quietly in the sidebar. It would be useful if you would sign up as I would notice your little icon each time you visited. If nobody does it will have to go but I’m in no hurry. Twitter is a good idea and enables you to Instant Message (or use a text message from your mobile if you are in the USA) to say what you are up to. The problem with me is that I don’t seem to be living a very exciting life and I’m painfully aware that Twittering it just highlights the sleep, eat, work and play life that I live. I like my life, a lot actually, but unless I can twitter something interesting there doesn’t seem to be any point in keeping it. The Flickr widget is cool and apart from eating some bandwidth I love it.

CoComment is cool but would be useful if I made a lot of comments “everywhere” there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point in commenting on my favorite blogs whose authors get a rerun when they come here. I think it’s more useful for those that spend a lot of time commenting. At this present time my commenting is on a par with the number of visitors I get. Discrete

Then there is Snap. This is what displays those little pop-ups over links to external pages. The idea is to give you some information, either to promote the link visually or indicate that it *isn’t* interesting. Tjis is not always obvious from the link text.

I came across a Digg article today with a lot of angry comments on this app.

Snap’s preview anywhere gizmo is ruining the reading experience for millions of people. Its intrusive, obstructive and unuseful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it’s useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory.

The Download Squad also has an article saying that Snap’s preview is obnoxious (and there’s a word I haven’t heard for a while)

Before I take it out would you care to comment ?

With all that in mind I am disabling most of this new stuff. Luckily my template (K2) handles sidebar widgets elegantly so all I have to do is disable them for now.

By the way, my earlier post on SharpCast has persuaded me to put the widget on a separate page and I plan on doing that real soon now!