Sunday, September 10, 2006

AJAXifying Your Blog: 3 Ways to Enrich Your Blog

For those missed out , heres a overview of what my session at BlogCamp on Day-1 was about .

Since the unConference was indeed catered to bloggers , i decided to explain how asynchronous methodologies could help in the productivity of blogs in particular ......through 3 methods .


3 Ways that will enrich Blogs in the Future


1. From Content related 'Ads' to content related 'Content'
Traditionally people always took to adding a smart ad -aka adsnese /other text ads to insert ads that are in vibe with the rest of your blog posts /site content . This offers viewers more customized content . But why stop at that . The reason why the best bloggers prosper is because they do most home-work . Take that extra effort to push your own content. I know most people can relate to the fact that they might have made a lot of good posts over the years/months. So how do you get productive and make the most of your own creative content ? By simply reusing it smartly . Clever use of past creative content would give users visibility to explore your older pages . How ? By moving from Content related 'Ads' to content related 'Content'. Gapp in his nice tut yesterday at blogCamp titled "wordress hacks", explained that Wordpress offers the option of having an rss feed of your own categories,which can be placed in a widget /sidebar. Same theory holds for other providers . You not have a neat column of your favourite posts or posts from the blogs you read or feeds from your fav tech hud RIGHT on your blog. Personally i dont see the move towards ajaxy desktops. Instead what people develop is ways to bring content to your own blog.Why go after it . I dont need to go through N feeds ,if i have a neat sidebar with posts from my fav feeds or a list of my friends whove updated their blogs offlate . You get the Picture right .... make your blog all the more content wise with interesting 'content related content '.

2. Better use of your Archives.
Ive always wondered if I could make a better use of the gibberish numbers that take up considerable amount of space . Whats the alternative .Where do I see the future of Blog Archives heading - that pushes the frequency imformation of your posts with dates AS WELL AS inspire people to check out the blogs ?

Check out the demo for yourself .

3. Widgets , Widgets , Widgets
One line of Code . Thats all a bloggers need to have ,and need to get functional widgets. We are going to see more need for develoers to creat ewdigets for blogs ,rather than a site with widgets that you have to go to. Just stay where you are ,and plug them in .From blog statistics and pinkers , to flikr rolls and your favourite quotes . Here are a couple of widgets i showcased - best seen on Firefox.

- BlogCamperKode => a widget i developed for blogCamp
- TechEnclave News Ticker => one line of code (script tag) that adds an ajax forum ticker that reads from the site i help running - TechEnclave.com
- PineFeeds => something i amade sometime in 005 .

So there you have it... It was fun to be at blogCamp , looking forward for more events like this one ,and more geeky garage innovations from yours truly ... 8)

Keep Clicking,
Bhasker V Kode

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

nice work! keep keep us non-techies in mind the next time. what is ajax in the first place?
nandhusundaram
phoenixflicks.blogspot.com

Bosky said...

hey ! ,check out this post ,its just about he time i stumbled upon the usage of ajax myself.

in simple terms - its the concept of updating data from a server without page refresh . allowing more interactive and asynchronous communication possible . 8 )

Keep Clicking,
Bhasker