Please note the new Amazon widgets
[NOTE: I’m placing this at the top of the blog for a day or two more, just for those who haven’t seen it yet. Then it will be allowed to fall back down on the page and out of sight. But the wonderful widgets will remain.]
The Amazon connection is now working properly. So go right ahead if you so desire and use the click-throughs here, which you may note I’ve changed and expanded.
I actually had a lot of fun assembling the Amazon widgets you see on the right sidebar, All three of them (count ’em, three!) can be used to click through to Amazon and place an order. Anything you buy there (not just my recommendations) will give me four cents for every dollar you spend—minus a few purchases such as Kindle books, or things you had already placed in your cart.
I’ve spaced the Amazon boxes out at regular intervals on the sidebar, so you will need to scroll down a bit to see all three. The topmost one is for book recommendations. It’s stationary and has a second page you can click on. The second and third* are for music and videos, respectively. Both of those scroll automatically and slowly, although each has a pause button on top. They will also temporarily stop moving if you place the cursor over a selection to view the title and price. Pretty nifty, I think, although a bit busy
The reason I’m calling your attention to all of this is that I’m curious to get some feedback on whether you think all the bells and whistles are a plus, a minus, or neutral. For instance, do the widgets affect your loading speed? Do you find the movement of the latter two attractive or distracting (or neither)?
In other words, what do you think? I plan to change the recommended selections now and then, but I can tweak them in a host of other ways.
*[NOTE: On my lovely Mac, I’ve just noticed that on Safari the two scrolling widgets don’t display consistently; sometimes yes, sometimes no. But they do fine on Firefox. All you MacLovers out there, is that true for you?]
Mac OS 10.4 — Firefox : 1st Widget only. 2nd widget appeared with page reload, but no 3rd widget.
I dislike moving ads.
Neo,
I love your blog but scrolling widgets make me dizzy! 🙂
FWIW…
The ads themselves aren’t a problem, but having them in motion certainly is.
After I allowed neoneocon.com in Adblock Plus, and allowed flash items to auto-load, and allowed all the Amazon scripts to load, I see your widgets just fine.
Not that I’m paranoid, but I prefer to know what websites are trying to feed my computer. And it is useful against evil-doers who want to set me up with a web page that is anti-social in that it wants to maximize my browser, and never let me leave their site.
Working fine in Safari 4.0.3 on Mac OS X 10.6.1, with whatever version of the Flash plugin ships with the system.
Neo,
The term “widgets” amuses me: when I was a kid, one spoke humorously of one’s uncle, who was employed by some corporate entity making “widgets.” In that era, these were actual physical objects, however ill-defined.
Now my two youngest sons — identical twins, one of whom is an electrical engineer, and the other a computer engineer — make (among other things) “widgets” for an important software behemoth.
😉
O tempora, o mores!
Jamie Irons
Add me to the ranks of those who find these things disturbing, for both of the reasons already listed: the moving stuff on the screen, which distracts from your brilliance and that of your commentariat, and the unpleasantness of remote feeds into my computer.
I hope you find some good (other) way to make some money off your efforts, which are deeply appreciated.
Thanks…
The Amazon loads are taking half the time of the page load. At least your text comes up first.
Slow page loading can be a big problem for users. For example, Gateway-pundit has a new hosting page (firstthings.com), and it takes over 50 sec to load. The blog text doesn’t display until it’s all loaded. I won’t be going there much anymore.
The Amazon ad scrolling is quite distracting.
One reason I’ve stopped visiting several sites I like is because they’ve added scrolling widgets. Fortunately, I can’t see the scrolling ones here. I don’t know why, but consider it a blessing.
I also find the scrolling widgets distracting. No mas!
I think I’m going to change the scrolling widgets, then, to stationary ones. It may take me a day or two.