My Outsourced Brain

Dynamic Javascript Loading on Scroll

2011-01-04T16:16:00.001+01:00

If you have a lot of widgets on your webpage page, you can try out many tools in order to speed up page loading, however there is a limit to optimization. It is often tried to put heavy javascripts at the end of page loading, putting them before or using the window.onload function. In this post, I show an alternative that has the advantage of shorter initial page loading and a smoother

Social Toolbars for Websites

2010-12-30T21:36:00.009+01:00

Apture toolbar with branding, share buttons, and search bar. Many websites have an interactive toolbar providing social and other instruments situated often on top or on the bottom of the page. Blogger has its Navbar, Wordpress has WordPress Bar, and there are many other toolbars with different functionalities that offer integration with basically any website. This article provides a comparison

Disqus Comments on this Blog

2010-12-16T23:57:00.012+01:00

In an earlier article on the importance of comments for a blog I summarized studies about blog comments, concluding that blog comments lead to more traffic, better search engine optimization (SEO), apart from being personally rewarding to the blog writer. I worked on many optimizations for this blog to make commenting more attractive. Recently I made a major change on this blog and changed the

Widgets for Most Popular Articles on Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Propeller, and Reddit

2010-01-15T01:38:00.008+01:00

One of the most appealing elements on a webpage are "popular posts". There are several possibilities to get popular posts, e.g. by number of comments or visitor statistics. In this post I present 5 widgets that display your highest voted posts from social websites. These widgets can serve to increase visitor involvement and as navigational element. Some of these widgets display a vote or bookmark

A Custom Search Engine for Blogger

2009-11-30T18:48:00.004+01:00

When I or other people used the searched function on this blog for some article they like they often couldn't find it, because the standard blogger search doesn't index all pages. This was annoying and either people left or they were forced to go through the article archive in order to find articles. There is an alternative to standard blog or google searches which allows people to always find

Firefox in Parallel - A Pre-Release Version

2009-11-28T16:23:00.014+01:00

If you run Firefox and look at the system resources, you will see the use of one processor go up until 100 percent when you load several pages at once. Most personal computers today have at least two processors, if not more, and not using them is a waste of your time. Instead of loading multiple pages one after the other as it is doing now, it might as well load them at the same time using

Embed Google Wave in Blogger

2009-11-15T13:37:00.007+01:00

Yesterday I received an invite for google wave, google's new communication tool that had the potential to unify all of their services. I wanted to try how to embed a google wave in blogger. After some tinkering and trying I had it. Here it goes. Image taken from Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009. Credit: Rambling Librarian at Flickr. You can find a very nice introduction to

Greeting Widget (Entrecard, Twitter, etc.)

2009-11-07T22:22:00.005+01:00

You might have noticed a greeting message on this blog. You would see different welcome messages depending on whether you come from a search engine, twitter, or entrecard. This post describes how to install such a welcome widget in your blog or website. Installation is as simple as copy-pasting a code. Credits for a welcome message to Visitors from Entrecard and Twitter goes to Laura from

Best Blog Tools

2009-11-03T23:30:00.006+01:00

I compiled a list of useful internet resources for blogging. Categories for blog tools include page design and cross-browser testing, testing page loading performance, seo tools, social media tools, and post editing. If you think any page should be added, please comment. Page DesignCombining Color Palettes and FontsTypetester provides a comparison tool for different fonts. Color Scheme

Blogger: Most Popular Posts Widget (Google Analytics)

2009-11-01T01:05:00.002+01:00

There are several widgets for wordpress to show most popular posts, however, as far as I know, there is no good widget yet for blogger. In my last article, I explained how to set up a blogger widget that shows most popular posts based on feedburner statistics. In this post I explain how to create a widget for your blogger blog that shows most viewed posts based on google analytics statistics. The

Blogger: Most Popular Posts Widget (Feedburner)

2009-10-29T23:48:00.005+01:00

There are several widgets for wordpress to show most popular posts, however, as far as I know, there is no such widget yet for blogger. In this post I explain how to create such a widget for your blogger blog. A prerequisite is rudimentary knowledge of python. The installation is a little bit more intricate than other widgets on this site. I think anyone, with some patience should be able to do

Blogger: Welcome Widget (Re-Search)

2009-10-22T02:51:00.002+02:00

On some internet sites, you may be greeted with a message like this: You searched google for "Blogger Welcome Widget." On our site there are 500 articles corresponding to that query.I wanted something like this for this site. In this article I present a simple bloger widget that presents a short greeting message containing query and number of search results. Clicking on the message triggers a

Translation Widget

2009-10-21T01:50:00.004+02:00

There are different blogger widgets for translation. They differ in look and functionality. In this post I compare some widgets and publish my own blogger widget code for translation. The standard google translation widget for blogger and other websites looks like this: A bit bulky in my opinion. At google translation tools you can build a pull-down menu like this one: Select the language

Blogger: Related Posts Widget

2009-10-12T07:56:00.001+02:00

There are different methods to list related posts in blogger. I have tried several of them and after reviewing, I think Yu-Jie Lin's blogger related posts is the best for several reasons. It is very fast and updates from feed once a day. Installation is very fast and can be done by installing the widget from Yu-Jie's blogger related post service and adding a code to your blogger template. However

Elegant Label Navigation: Ajaxlabels

2009-10-06T19:18:00.002+02:00

Ajaxlabels is a blogger functionality which allows previewing articles pertaining to labels without leaving the current page. This can be much faster than waiting each time for the label page to load. I found this cool hack at blogger-hacked. Credits go to Deepak Ranganathan. I explain it here, because I update it by a simple fix and because the way I explain you save hosting of javascripts. In

Speed Up Loading of Website and Blog

2009-10-05T23:37:00.014+02:00

There are so many widgets, scripts, and multimedia to put on a website! And many of them are so nice. Problem is, if you put too many of them, your site will load very slowly. This will drive visitors away and will let search engines to rank you worse. The faster your site loads, the better. General advice: your site should load in about 10 seconds, otherwise people will get bored. Here I