taking joy in the popping of the social media bubble & other web 2.0 silliness
Just a quick note to let WinExtra readers know that the blog has been upgraded to the new WordPress 2.7 build. Hopefully everything is playing nice – seems to be so far – but if you notice anything hinky please let me know so I can get it fixed.
As far as the new version of WordPress goes – it sure looks good on the backend and it does seem to be a little faster.
Once in awhile – if I end up in the subscription display of my feeds in FeedDemon I find myself prompted to cleanup my feeds. Today was such a day and this is what I got after it was finished
Hmm .. 5,510 dead items after 32 days. Not bad I guess considering this was a slow month for news 
A number of months back I decided to experiment on WinExtra by trying out a more magazine style approach to the design and layout. Around the same time I started working for Duncan over at The Inquisitr and I saw how well the magazine style worked for him so I figured – what the hell can’t hurt to try.
It took me a few days to find the theme layout I liked and then a couple more to get it working the way I wanted but it was up and running. The response seemed to be pretty positive at the time so I figured I had made a good decision. Sure it meant that I had to do all my posts from the WordPress admin online editor mainly because of the custom fields the theme required to display the pictures properly. I gotta tell that had to be one of the harder parts for me because it meant I couldn’t use Windows Live Writer – that was painful.
One of the newest sidebar baubles that is showing up in blog sidebars is a new Google Friend Connect widget. I first really saw it in action after Duncan over at The Inquisitr was lucky enough to be among the early users of it. Now I didn’t think that WinExtra would be high enough profile to warrant being included in the beta run of Google’s Friend connect but I figured what the hell and applied anyway.
That was a few days ago and I had pretty well forgotten about it until I got an email this afternoon letting be know I’d been accepted and to go get my code. Needless to say I promptly headed off to the supplied link like a good little blogger with a new toy to play with. With the code all in place you can now join WinExtra as a “friend”, just look for the Friend Connect widget in the sidebar to the right..
Uhm … now what?
Really … other than letting you have the avatars of people who have joined as friends of the site what is this bringing to the table for bloggers? I’ve been hearing terms like viral and other such buzzwords about how this will help spread the word about a blog; but I’m not sure how this is suppose to happen.
On the Friend Connect site where bloggers manage their account there are a bunch of other widgets that we can add to the sidebar. While these widgets let members leave comments, rate the site or posts I think that this will probably benefit Google in the end – but time will tell I guess.
As for those extra widgets – I think I’ll hold off until either there are actual site members to uses them or someone can give me some good examples on how they’ll help. If you are curious about Friend Connect for blogs here’s a short video from Google
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