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Plaxo badge in sidebar

This is a quickpost: I've joined Plaxo, tweaked too many settings to mention or recall, and added a Plaxo widget to the sidebar (currently right). Since Plaxo was a TRUSTe certified site, I had few qualms about linking from it to many other web presences.

SearchCrystal

This is an experimental post in which I'm embedding a searchCrystal widget. Thanks to MaryH for pointing it out, and providing a concrete example of its use.

I discovered this interesting visualization tool on the IES Book and Literature Circle Blog, in The Little Prince Literature Circles Week Two post (2008.05.28), through a Learning with Computers network connection in a Shelfari Group: Book, Short Stories Suggestions for the Classrooms and Activities (2008.09.04).

According to the page where I got the widget embedding code for this post (seachCrystal: Widgets), "The searchCrystal Widget visualizes the overlap between the result sets of five major search engines," for example, images on Ask, Flickr, Google, MSN, and Yahoo! (searchCrystal: Home). In order to fit the current template for this blog, I reduced the size of the display (below) from a default 600 pixels square to 400 pixels.

Spring into Summer

At long last, I've got Spring Widgets working again. The exasperation was unbearable. It has taken almost a year to get to where I almost was last spring. That is, to:

• Display more than one feed in one widget, if any at all, and
• Get one logo to display at the head of more than one feed in the widget.

Work-arounds among Feedburner, SpringWidgets, Firefox, and Safari finally succeeded! Though I'm not sure I can replicate, or even remember the steps, an RSS Reader near the top of the sidebar now displays feeds from two Edublogs:

1. The Language Learner Development Project Blog (my newest), and
   
2. The Language Teacher Development Project Blog (oldest, second only to pab's potpourri).

Saving the logo separately for each feed in Feedburner seemed to do the trick for the display, but had to be done for both before getting the widget code for either blog from Spring Widgets. The bar divider between SpringWidget blog feeds worked in Safari, today. I should have tried that instead of Firefox months ago, when I first encounter scripting errors while trying to retrieve widget code through Firefox.

Yet just now, drafting this post in Safari, I was unable to use standard copy and paste keyboard commands. So I saved this post there, opened it again here in Firefox, et voilà!

Notes on Feevy

Feevy is a free online service for collecting and recasting RSS feeds in sleek, pre-formatted widgets (three+ styles) that I learned about in the Blogging for Educators workshop (TESOL EVO, 2008). I've tried it out in the sidebar, and in a post on this blog, with both a feed from a separate blog, and a comment feed from this blog. [I've removed the experimental post, and replaced the experimental sidebar widget already.]

One upside of Feevy is, like in PageFlakes, you don't need to know where to find or how to construct an RSS feed for a blog or website. You can simply copy the URL of the site you want to add to your widget, and paste the URL into the Feevy site, which creates the widget code for you, either from URLs (one at a time) or from OPML input (in batches). The more sites you add to your Feevy collection, the more content is likely to bubble up through the widget itself. Another upside is you can put Feevy widget code almost anywhere on your blog or site, or in multiple locations.

Though I had already written, "...you can only have one Feevy widget...," [that was wrong;] there are ways you can trick up different displays by tagging the blogs you add or have added to your Feevy collection, and tweaking the appearance of the widget. For details, please check the FAQ (item 2.5, Can I tag the blogs in my feevy for... different feevies? 2008.03.04) [or compare the two widgets currently in the sidebar {upper and lower right, 2008.03.05}].

ELT notes: On Gadgets and Widgets (Ceraso)

In ELT notes: On Gadgets and Widgets, Claudia C. makes a host of fine points about audiences, purposes, and the choices that we make to suit both - as well as ourselves - as bloggers, community members, and educators. I am grateful to the organizers of the Blogging for Educators workshop for pointing out Claudia's post again this year (Blogging4Educators Pageflakes, Week 4, Extra Reading [February 2008]).

In conclusion, Claudia suggests that "adding widgets [to blogs] for the sake of practice is creating a noise in communication with students, audience and community." She goes on, "Widgets are meant to be simple. Learn about them, know what there is available[,] and trust yourself that you will manage to install them pretty fast when you or the purpose of your blog post needs them" (emphasis added, pab).

Claudia is careful, verging on fastidious in her choices of widgets for her teaching blog (The FCE Blog), and meticulous about the layout (no sidebars) and presentation of other gadgets (all at the end of posts) on her professional development blog (ELT Notes). I think she is modeling as much as telling us what helps learners and other readers get right to the heart of her ideas (February 15, 2007).