AdesBlog.com

Yesterday I signed up with MagikWidget after seeing it on the Guy Kawasaki blog. I liked the star rating widget in particular that you can put for your blog posts. However I was disappointed to find out that you couldn’t integrate it to your template.Technically you can integrate it to your template to show up after every post but the problem is that all of the widgets will be rating the same item and displaying the same rating. If you want to put for every post you need to create a new widget every time and integrate it manually.

I am guessing they did it intentionally, because for every widget you create you need to spend 1 credit. And credits do not come free 500 credits will cost you $25. Other than that they have Poll Widget, Skypecasts Widget, Delicious Widget, Digg Widget and many more on the way.

At the moment they are accepting suggestions from users for creating new widgets. If they accept your idea, they will give you credit and your link will have the option to be integrated into the widget [see image at the left].

I think it’s okay if they charge for their service but I personally think the widgets should be usable throughout the blog (on every post). Rather than charging 1 credit for it, they could charge 50 or 100 credits. www.majikwidget.com

Here is a nice tool that can create almost all social bookmarks links for your blog and here is a tool that makes RSS buttons. www.TopRankBlog.com

Max Kiesler has made a page with lots of cool ajax scripts.

Over the course of the last year I’ve spent some time searching and collecting links for downloadable image galleries and slideshows. Below you’ll find a categorized list of all of the AJAX image solutions I’ve been able to find that were of some use.

The scripts are categorized into:

• AJAX Galleries
• AJAX Lightboxes
• AJAX Slides
• AJAX Slideshows
• AJAX Image Manipulation

www.maxkiesler.com

Yshout! is a AJAX+CSS+PHP based shout-box script. It is XHTML compliant and very easy to install. Here you can see the working demo. The name of the script looks like as if it is from Yahoo! Maybe the author wants Yahoo! to acquire this script, maybe? yurivish.com/yshout/

Here is an interesting article about ajax and pagecounts at Business 2.0 blog. Since ajax applications do not require reloading pages, it might reduce your website’s pagecount. If you make money from advertising, particularly from CPM (cost per 1 thousand impression) based ad networks then using ajax on your site might reduce your earnings. When you have a lower pagecount you cannot charge advertisers more than what your pagecount claims.

Therefore it’s important to structure your design in a way so that your ads get displayed properly and reloaded if necassary. After all Google has done it, and is making a lot money with its Gmail using ajax. Also, more important characteristic for advertisers is not the pagecount but unique visitors that visit your site per day/month/year. And using ajax on your site do not alter the unique visitor statistics. I personally would say; go for ajax as long as it improves your site’s usability.

You might have seen this kind of rating systems on some of the websites on the net, it’s easy and very usable - no drop down menus, no submit buttons, you just click on the star and you are done. All the calculations are then done at the background and the results are shown back to you with the latest ratings. That’s the power of Ajax!

This script has been developed by MasugaDesign, thanks to Ryan Masuga for making our life easier.

If you want to develop your own star rating system there is a tutorial at KomodoMedia.