While I was in tweaking performance in the BUMPzee widget, I made a few simple changes…

First, you may have noticed that your own avatar picture appears in the recent visitors. Originally I designed it to not show the blog owner in the visitors. I’m not sure why. I think I noticed that MBL wasn’t showing it. I say why not?

If this bugs you and you want it the old way, please speak up.

Second, Stephen Cronin posted today about using iframes to speed up slow widgets (guilty), including his own implementation of a wordpress plugin to wrap iframes around widgets. There was a problem with the BZ widget in that clicks were staying inside the widget. So I added target=”_top” to the links in the widget so that it would open links in the main window, not in an iframe. I can’t imagine any bad effects from this, but if you see any, again let me know.

We’ve made some small changes to the bumpzee recent posts widget that you may have noticed.

1. If you show top posts, the bump button no longer has a “halo”. This will look much better on those that have set up a dark background, like Dane.

2. We’ve tried to clean up some of the CSS, being more explicit on some of the settings so the widget doesn’t pick up too much from the site’s CSS and look funny.

We’ve got a few cool new things coming soon, like an online color configuratror, customizable width, and more. Stay tuned…

We’ve released a new version of the Bumpzee widget wordpress plugin.

There are a few new features in this plugin:

1. The recent readers/top entries widget is now included in this plugin (instead of cutting and pasting the javascript).

2. The recent readers/top entries widget has additional configuration to allow the display of visitors to be a grid instead of a single list. You can choose how many pictures to show and in how many columns. The pictures resize accordingly.

3. Most importantly, using either the recent readers widget or the bump this widget from this plugin will get your blog’s comments reported here on Bumpzee. This is a great and unique way for people to see that there is a discussion going on over at your blog, as I talked about here: where’s the discussion?

For installation instructions, see the widgets page.

BUMPzee works like an RSS feed reader and gets the headlines from every blog in the list every 15 minutes for each community. The headlines are displayed here on the list.

If you like an entry, give it a ‘bump’. That’ll give those entries priority when viewing the entries sorted by score.

Widgets are Available
Bumpzee widgets are now publicly available. They’re still in beta, but now you can get a “bump this” button for your blog entries and a newest posts & recent visitors widget. All the cool kids are getting them!

Check out the new widgets page

Note: these widgets are still new “beta” code.