Thin & Light

Gmail is my Firefox home page and is always open as long as Firefox is there. So I wrote this Greasemonkey script to show Google Reader’s unread count in the nav-bar of Gmail. A good place, isn’t it?

The script checks for the unread count every 8 minutes. But after you click the “Reader” link, it checks the count 1 minute later and extend the interval by 1 minute after every check until the interval returns to 8 minutes again.

Install Greasemonkey，and then install this script。

Page on userscripts.org.

A few days back, a friend asked me whether the neighbor post preview plugin can be customized to show the post title in preview.

Yes, that’s a wonderful idea. Many WordPress users just use “next post” or “previous post” as the navigation link text instead of the post title. This can save much space and readers can more easily focus on the title of current post (example page). If you noticed, Live Spaces are using left/right arrow icons as the link text.

So I implemented this idea into my plugin. By doing this, it becomes more useful for those people who didn’t show the post titles in the link text.

Thanks, Penelope, for this great idea.

Go to the plugin homepage for download. When activated, go to the options page for customization (http://yourdomain/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=neighbor-post-preview.php).

The theme used in this blog is designed by myself. It’s really simple and light-weight. As requested by Dan, I’m now releasing it for use by all WordPress users.

The homepage of the theme.

The theme may contain some code specific to my site. If you find any bugs or problems, please leave a comment.

I assume you’re reading this post on its own page (i.e. the permalink). If you’re on the front page, or in an RSS reader, please go to its own page.

Above the title of this post, there is the previous/next post navigation bar. Now hover your mouse on the previous post link, but don’t click . Did you see the little bubble showing the excerpt of the previous post? That’s it!

Sometimes title is not enough for visitors to determine whether the post is worth reading. With an excerpt, more information is provided. Some posts with great titles are worthless, while some great stories are under unromantic titles.

I just made the plugin Neighbor Post Preview to do this thing. Visit its page for download and installation instructions.

Thanks to the great JavaScript libraries – Prototype and Prototip.

Hope you enjoy this plugin and I welcome all feedbacks and suggestions.

First I’d like to thank Ian for mentioning my widget colorer tool on the MyBlogLog Blog. It’s great encouragement for me. And thanks to the great guys who stumbled it.

As I discovered, hundreds of visitors came according to Google Analytics, but only less than 15 had a try. A failure? I think so. There is some problem with user experience or the tool itself is not very useful.

However I’m not too frustrated (Thanks again to the great people mentioned above). Today I added a widget to track the visitors, so finally the widget colorer got a recent readers widget of its own. It’s at the bottom of the page. Go now for a position on the widget

Of course it’s generated by the widget colorer itself. I used the handy Firefox extension called ColorZilla (highly recommended) to pick colors of the site for perfect match.

Still I want your feedbacks or suggestions to improve the poor user conversion rate. I’m ready for criticisms.

When I started to use MyBlogLog days ago, I thought it should have another widget generator besides the current one (http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/[community name]/widgets/). The current widget customizer first give you a preview of color scheme but no layouts. When you’re satisfied with the colors, click the button and you’ll see the actual layout with the colors.

The problem is that a color scheme good for the default layout is not necessarily good for customized layouts. When you realized this and want to tweak the colors, you just can’t do this based on previous customization. Even you hit ‘Go back’ button of your browser, the color scheme is lost.

It’s more natural for users to choose a layout first and customize the colors based on the “real” layout.

Widget is critical for MyBlogLog. It won’t go far without providing the widgets for bloggers to put on their sidebars.

So I created the tool – MyBlogLog Widget Colorer.

Features

• Live preview of colors on real widget. You’ll get the *real* effect whenever you change a color (click to enlarge):

  

• Unrestricted colors. With the color picker you can choose any color available and there’s an input for hex color code, so you can make it exactly match your site theme. (I did this by editing the code by hand before )
• Quick adoption of user submitted themes. If you like a color theme listed in the right panel, use it with just one click. Also you can share your beautiful theme with others by clicking the show off button.

  

How to use

1. Go to MyBlogLog Widget Colorer.
2. Enter the mblID. It’s a 16-digit number assigned to your community by MyBlogLog. You can see it in the code provided by MyBlogLog:

   

3. Change the layout settings.
4. Click the “Customize Colors” to go to the next step. Here you can tweak the colors or directly use a color theme listed on the right. When you’re done, copy the code to use in your site. Don’t forget to show off your beautiful theme!

Beneath the scene

Thanks for mooRainbow – the great JavaScript color picker from w00fz. If you’re feeling great joy when selecting a color, thank him . This color picker is made with mootools JavaScript Framework. I had no experience with mootools before, but since it adopts the similar way with Prototype, it’s not too hard for me to use.

If this tool become popular, I may enhance it with more features like customization history, etc. Sadly there is still no API from MyBlogLog, though expected by many people.

Please leave a comment here if you have questions or suggestions