MyBlogLog Spam
Lots of people are aware that there was a problem over the weekend with co-author requests being sent out, and some forced adding as authors to communities.
It was a long weekend in the US, but it seems the MyBlogLog team have already fixed it, rolled back any changes, and hopefully it won’t happen again.
I think this might have affected the larger communities more than the lesser ones. I only received a single community request and it wasn’t a forced inclusion
They have also posted a long description of their plans to control spam going forward. (via Darren).
I welcome the changes, and feel that placing “adding” restrictions will help significantly. We will see how the new messaging system works.
Widget Performance
I have seen quite a few complaints about MyBlogLog widget performance
This is normally on:-
- Blogs with a poor layout – If you load your sidebar first it affects your readership, and probably your search engine performance as well. Choose a theme where the content is displayed first, or shoot your designer
- High Traffic Blogs – I don’t think this actually has an effect on the speed, but owners of high traffic blogs tend to notice this more, and are more vocal about it
For those with a poor template design, whilst it might be a painful choice to make, the problem isn’t just the MyBlogLog widget – you really should have your content appearing first, and a good designer should be able to create almost any layout you desire placing the content first.
For the higher traffic blogs, there is probably a solution that could be adopted. In a recent comment on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog, Mark mentioned the following:-
Jeremy,
Just do what I do; a cron job that runs curl on the widget address every so often, saves the output, and just uses an include to display the content. I use a jsp include, but I’m sure you could do it in php as well. No relying upon third parties for your page display time performance, no annoying dns round trip times, everything just works.
Later in the comments I suggested that someone creating some kind of plugin that does this for Wordpress users or maybe just a simple PHP include so anyone can use it is likely going to receive a fair amount of link love, and fix their performance issues with MyBlogLog and a host of other widgets.
2 Comments
There’s a little hack you can use to improve performance. By temporarily changing your blog name to wordpress.com you can get a no-javascript / image-only version of MyBlogLog.
http://engtech.wordpress.com/2007/01/15/mybloglog-widget-for-wordpresscom-blogs-one-of-the-best-web-widgets-available/
Does it allow you to have different size images?
I have been looking for something that will result in a 10×7 or similar, but much smaller images