Google Gadgets - 3 comments

If you have a customised Google Home Page, you'll be familiar with Gadgets: mini Google calendars, mail views, maps, puzzles, clocks, timers, and so forth.

Well, it turns out that it's surprisingly easy to create new ones. The following simple Recently Recommended (yes, that again) gadget took no more than half-a-day from start to finish (which includes me wasting an hour or two on a rather dumb first version). It doesn't auto-update (though it could), but it does at least give you the latest each time you refresh your page. I'm sure you can think of other, more interesting candidates for gadget-isation.



Click the button below to add this to your own Google page.



Please test gently at first. I'll submit the gadget to Google's directory if all goes well, so please don't publicise until then. Do let me know if you see anything weird.

Thanks to everyone whose kind donations have seen their blogs immortalised in the screenshot. Only kidding - that's an unadulterated list, but it's a hassle to recreate the images, so you're stuck with them for the time being!

Cruddas fever - 1 comment

I've met Jon Cruddas (briefly) - he seems like a great guy, and I don't have a big problem with the fervour for his campaign that we're seeing amongst Labour bloggers, except when people are disproportionately using our recommendations facility to plug, frankly, just about any blog post that offers favourable coverage.

I know it's pointless to issue guidelines about recommendations, but the original vision was that it was the "best" articles that would attract votes, not just the ones you liked or that supported a particular faction or campaign that you were associated with. It's not a huge deal, but there have been some pretty blatant examples of this happening, and today's is just one of several.



I don't know whether these seven votes are the result of one person or several, and I'm sure it's nothing to do with the bloggers who appear above, but surely people can see that recommending posts (one of which consists of a single link) in this way is unethical, just as it is unethical to vote for your own posts. In the great scheme of things this hardly matters a jot, but we're not so vast and faceless a network that there aren't people who care about keeping things tidy, honest, and sticking up for those bloggers who plough lonely furrows but who still produce great posts.

Update (10/03 @ 00:50): whoever's doing this obviously isn't reading, as the last three recommendations have gone onto the same pile.

Blog and Post reviews on the Wiki - no comments

I've created two more pages on our Wiki site that everyone (yes, everyone, whatever their political persuasion) has the right to contribute to. What they give you is the opportunity to post reviews of Labour blogs, and reviews of the top posts (as judged by the Recommendations facility).

There are a number of motivations for these new facilities. Firstly, they're part of a move away from "recommendation by authority" - self-styled (what else is there?) blog gurus selecting their own favourites, however reliable their skill and judgement might be. They're also a move away from opinion polls - however cunningly set-up and well-meant, little commitment is required by the voter, and rarely any opportunity to make a detailed statement. All the evidence suggest bloggers like to write, like to write about their friend's blogs, and are thrilled to have things written about their own blogs and articles. Seeing as most of us would be shot-down in short measure if we tried to set up Wikipedia pages for our blogs, here's a similarly democratic and decentralised alternative, albeit without the entry requirements. Malicious or abusive entries will, of course, be dealt with, just as they are on Wikipedia.

If you look at the pages I set up, you'll see a few rules and suggestions, but these are just intended to keep people on the straight-and-narrow. I'd like to see as many blog- and post-reviews as possible - at the very least, so people are more likely to find good and accurate ones. If this catches on, I don't think it's too fanciful to think we might have something worthy of (paper) publication. So, if you're worried that Tim Worstall's BritBlog roundup has given the same few dozen blogs enough gongs already, perhaps we can breathe some life into the whole democratic blog-reviewing genre.

Once again, if you've seen some posts on a B4L blog that you like and fancy reviewing in one or two paragraphs, or want to immortalise a few of your favourite blogs in text form, please head over to the relevant page. Do also check in to see if you've been reviewed yourself, and help us spread the word on your own blog!

RSS feeds are available on each Wiki page.

Recommendations / Greasemonkey - 7 comments

I've posted a couple of times about our recommendations facility: your chance to give thumbs-up to your favourite posts from the B4L bloggers, allowing us to identify the most popular articles, and the bloggers who have published the most such pieces.

At the moment, all 'votes' are collected by clicking the "Recommend" link on our various recent posts pages. This is fine if the post is less than two days old, and you do all your reading through this one site.

Now we offer you the chance to recommend articles from within the very blog that published them. How - are we going to somehow 'add something of our own' to that site to make it possible? In a way, yes.



Firefox users (please use version 1.5 if you possibly can) may use the well-established Greasemonkey extension, which is available here, to achieve just that.

What is Greasemonkey? Well, it's a tool that lets you run custom 'scripts' in a secure environment on any browser page you load. You can download it here (it's tiny), or - if that doesn't work - by clicking on the most recent version here.

Once installed, restart Firefox.

Now, all you need do is visit our script's page.

It won't look like much, but if Greasemonkey is installed OK, at the top of the page will be a red monkey logo and, on the right, an "Install" button.

Click that button, it's perfectly safe. Once again, no personal information is transmitted in either direction.

Next time you load up a page in Firefox, check the bottom of the Tools menu. There'll be a menu at the end named "User Script Commands", containing two options. If there isn't, try reloading the page.

• Recommend page to Bloggers4Labour - select this to recommend the page you have open before you. It should, of course, be a page from a Labour-supporting blog that is 'on our books'. Any other page will give you a surprisingly patient and tolerant warning message. If the vote went through, we'll tell you, together with the current score for that page.
• View Bloggers4Labour recommendations - select this to visit our page with all the scores.

Hope that's clear, and you find the new facility useful and interesting.

Thanks to Andrew Brown for the inspiration.

Incidentally, if you're a developer and want to know how the system works, or need detailed assistance, I'm happy to assist, however, a small donation (say £5.00 or equivalent) - see PayPal link at foot of page - will greatly increase the likelihood that I am able to take time out to help.