Yesterday I was doing some tests with widgetbox. Specifically I was trialling the Flickr slideshow on my other blog (The Throbbing Thumb). The Flickr slideshow can be customised to show photos from a specific user ID and/or a specific tag. In my test I decided to display all the Flower photos from my account.
Widgetbox is a brilliant idea. Essentially developers create code snippets and define parameters and users select and customise the component. Widgetbox manages this process delivering custom javascript to the users blog. This system allows for a very wide range of widgets that are easily installed by the blogger.
I was really impressed by what widgetbox offers. Still after a day of testing I removed the Flickr slideshow. Mostly because it made the page load much slower. But also because for all it's customisation I couldn't tweak the widget to really fit my blog. The biggest problem was the Flickr ad (there was also a second option: a yahoo ad) which was too white and too close to my photos.
I hope to test some of the other widgets in the near future to determine if the slow load was specific to this widget or typical of widgetbox and to see if I can find widgets that better fit my design.
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