BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

If you are like me, you are always downloading some new widget for your blog or some new toolbar for your browser. Then later, sometimes you find out that it was a vehicle for malware or some other sleazy purpose.

It may not seem like a design issue, but security is a very big deal these days. People are having their blogs hacked (and deleted). And those who rely on advertising or product sales from their blogs stand to lose a lot. So boring as security may seem to some, it is very important to all of us—whether we realize yet it or not.

What if you didn’t have to worry about security, or viruses, or malware anymore? And if you sell products on your blog or offer downloadable information, what if you could guarantee the safety of your downloads to your readers? In a believable way?

A company called Comodo (http://www.comodo.com) offers free antivirus and firewall software. But more important, they are on a mission to make the Web a safe place. Or as they put it, to bring trust back to the Internet. How cool is that? 

And their software is really free, not just a demo.

BlogCatalog.com has come up with an interesting replacement for the BlogRush widget. It displays your own blog posts (on however many blogs you have registered with BlogCatalog) and some other activities such as Diggs. You’ll see one in the right-hand sidebar of this page.

You can choose from about eight colors, and you set the width (in pixels) and the number of items to display (so you effectively control the height as well). If you have several blogs, this is a great way to send traffic from one to another.

Besides the WordPress version, you can create BlogCatalog widgets that work with Blogger and TypePad blogs as well. It is easy and fun.

BlogCatalog offers four different widgets in all. If you scroll down, you will see their Recent Viewers widget (with dozens of tiny pictures). Those are also highly customizable. You can choose the size, number of pictures, color of the frame and the text, and so on.

Widgets are just one of the benefits of belonging to the BlogCatalog community. You can get great exposure for you blogs there, join groups, make friends, and find many interesting and entertaining blogs. I highly recommend it.

Below that is a similar widget, created at MyBlogLog.com, another online blog-listing community where you should list your blogs if you haven’t already.

As I’m currently updating my old blogs and developing new ones, I will be checking on all the old favorite blog registrars and trying out new ones. I’ll report back here on the best ones I find.

Am I the only one who hates the new WordPress widget management feature? I guess it is OK if you have just a two-column theme (only one column of widgets). But this theme, for example, has three columns just for widgets: upper left, upper right, and lower.

The upper left and upper right columns have to be balanced to keep from leaving gaping holes in the layout. So now and then I have to move items back and forth. The old way was slow. The new way is horrible!

You can see all the widgets at once, in a list on the left of the widget management page, but you can only view one column of your page layout at at time. To move a widget from one column to another, instead of just dragging it (the old way), now you have to Remove it from one column, switch column views, and then Add it to the other.

In the old way you could not see how much space each widget would occupy (how many column inches), but you could see how many widgets were in each column, and with a good visual memory you could estimate. You could at least see all the columns at the same time.

Without seeing all the columns at once, I can’t remember what all is in each one (especially once I start moving things around). So now it’s just a lot harder to make even simple changes in the arrangement of the widgets. For me, anyway.

I can’t even imagine why anyone thought this was a better way to manage widgets. How about you?