by Brandon
May 26, 2009 02:37 AM
Remember these annoying animated .gifs from the 90?s?
Adding one to your website pretty much doomed it to a lonely obsolesce, preserved only by The WayBack Machine. Lucky for me, I was never that bad. I made some back end and minor cosmetic updates to the ?blahg? this weekend and thought about these as I was writing this post. The Internet sure has come a long way since animated .gifs were cool.
After integrating the latest BlogEngine updates, I made some CSS changes (most noticeably to the comments and image albums), made the image pop-ups (Lightbox) larger, added an AddThis image link to all posts and added the swirly rotating tag cloud you see to the left, BlogCumulus.Net.
AddThis claims to be ?the #1 bookmarking and sharing service, served over 20 billion times per month?. Now, I don?t doubt them one bit. I stuck this button on my posts primarily because the links included in my BlogEngine theme weren?t anything I would use. I think I?ll be lucky if one person out there uses the button for its intended purpose. Since my site is (currently) hosted on a old Pentium 3 in my garage, four or more visitors at once would probably kill the site completely.
BlogCumulus.Net is based off of a WordPress plug-in created by Roy Tanck. The creator of the BlogEngine plugin has website problems, but you can still get the plug-in from Google's Cache. Props to my friend Nick, since I saw a version of it on his site first. It?s a gee-whiz eye candy gadget, for sure, but much more attractive than most standard text-based tag clouds out there. I?ll see how it goes and will take it down if it gets too unruly.