I’ve dropped the first version of my widget, available here. (I don’t have any nice “click here to add” functionality yet; that’s for tomorrow.) I’ve collected a few more random observations while getting it out the door, which might be of interest to you.
Ajax Demo
Following up on yesterday’s notes on the shortcoming of Ajax, I thought it might be interesting to see an example. I’ve put up an Ajax-ified version of my puzzles here, which you can compare with the original version. I think the original feels more solid, but you can judge for yourself.
YuiCompressor on Fedora 10
My copy of the YuiCompressor crashed when I ran it against the JVM on my Fedora 10 box. Following a lead in these two posts, I found the solution was simple, if obscure: Remove the rhino.jar symlink in this directory:
/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0.x86_64/jre/lib
Gadgets.IO
Google’s OpenSocial documentation talks about the gadgets.io library. It didn’t seem to exist/be defined when I was doing my development. I assume I was doing something wrong, but be warned that this library isn’t as simply to use as the documentation might lead you to believe. (I ended up using _IG_FetchContent, which worked fine.)
Future Work
Having released v1.0 of the widget, now I naturally want to tinker with it a little; I want to add analytics to it, try to make it look a little better, and do some simple SEO-type things. Coming up:
- Look into making the widget easier for people to find
- Better aStore placement
- Puzzle forum postings
- Add social features to widget(?)
- Drop maximum bid, see if CPC can be lowered
Yesterday’s Stats
| Stat | 22nd |
|---|---|
| Visitors | 46 |
| Visits | 53 |
| Pageviews | 242 |
| Pages/Visit | 4.57 |
| Avg. Time on Site | 7:05 |
Well, traffic is up a bit. It appears that I can increase traffic by spending more money (at least anecdotaly) which would be interesting if this were a paying proposition. Around midnight tonight I’m going to lower my CPC bids to see if I can stretch my advertising dollar farther; I’ll run that regime over the weekend, and we’ll see what happened on Monday.
Follow Along
You can subscribe to my RSS feed, if you’d like to follow along with this month’s project, in which I attempt to create and popularize a puzzle site.
