Recent Reader Widget - Putting on the Gloss

Spring is a time for renewal. OK, that doesn't work for you folks sitting in the New England snow but here in California, it's beautiful out and a perfect day to . . . refresh our widgets!

The new widget has a glossy finish, multi-colored shading, and new, eye-catching icons to add readers to your community.

There "flyout" which fades in when you hover over a reader's photo for more details on that visitor. You can quickly browse more information about that reader and directly click through to that person's MyBlogLog profile or their community pages.

To keep it simple, we've limited the number of options when you configure this widget. There's a choice of seven colors, two layouts, and you can choose how you want the flyout to behave. No more messing about in CSS, choose the width and number of rows and it configures itself automatically.

For those of you who love to tinker, we've got plans for you. Stay tuned. We'll tell you how to upload your own skins.

I want to call out the graphic inspiration by Arlo Rose who took time out of his work with Yahoo Widgets to get us thinking about design. Also Manny Miller, our UI foo master who tweaked this code to no end and got it over the finish line.

Go have at it, update your sidebar widgets and give it a whirl. We think we've got most of the bugs squashed but if you see anything else that's weird, it would be great if you could let us know in the comments below. Known issues are posted in the Known Issues section of help but we'll be standing by and tackle new ones as they come in.

Comments

[Joe Lazarus]

Congrats guys... HUGE improvement. The old design bugged me. Love the new hotness. MBL is on a tear.

[Cody Simms]

Congrats guys. Looks great!

-c

[Olivier D. alias ze kat]

Beautifull and usefull :o) .oO(it's seem iPhone, LOL)

[whydowork]

cool!

very web 2.0'ish..

[Mike]

U talking about New England? Check the weather in the southern hemisphere ;-)
The widget does look slick...

[fred wilson]

where do i get the code?

i want to replace it

[Ian Kennedy]

Hi Fred,

It's in the same place as the other widget codes. On your profile page (http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/fredwilson), click the green 'get widgets' button under the listing for your blog.

Ian

[Lai]

Happy Valentine's Day

[Dan Pickett]

It's sort of a bummer that you can't customize the color - none of the background colors really mesh with my site - it would be sweet to be able to enter a hex color code in there, but it is a great widget!

[loxodon]

very nice widget ! :)
thank you

[Ben Tremblay]

<3

*waits for the heart to appear*

Hey, that works on Twitter!
;-P

Listen ... about widgets ... I've wanted a nice widget for one of my ?what? 5 blogs for a long, long while. But when I use the GrabThis link I get either a) same.old plain.vanilla or b) something that shows nothing at all.

So, assuming I'm gonna find my way out of this maze tonight, I'd like to suggest that the Get Widgets link on the site give a menu rather than just a block of code.

cheers
--bentrem

[Andrea Vit]

Wow!
Very nice!

[Gary James]

Very, very cool. Great job!

Looking forward to being able to customize it a bit..

Cheers,

Gary.

[fred wilson]

the flyout isn't working properly on my blog.

please send me an email at fredwilson at unionsquareventures dot com and let me know how i can fix that

thanks

fred

[kazama]

good widget
but I will wait for new version of it that can customize the bgcolor

[sbertolotti]

Erf, can't customize color and height...

[Ian Kennedy]

@Ben - the widgets are available for everyone. Visit your MyBlogLog community page for each of your blogs and you can configure the layout that works best for you.

@Fred - your TypePad CSS file is suppressing the flyout (overflow:hidden;). You can override that by putting the following two lines at the *very bottom* of your CSS file:

#left { overflow: visible }
#mbl_widget_popout { margin-top: -60px; }

@Gary, kazama, sbertolotti - yes, custom skins is next. Because of the shading effects, we made use of image sprites. We'll be adding instructions on how you can make your own in the near future.

[Nick]

Mine pretty much looks like crap too. Any suggestions? I already tried the #left { overflow: visible }
#mbl_widget_popout { margin-top: -60px; } with no luck.

[delicious shoes]

I like the new look and flyout feature!

[WHY CORNER]

Yes, now it's really glossy!

[Olivier D. alias ze kat]

Will you create same widget with landscape display (avatars on one row) ?

I may please to use it ;o)

[jmb]

Mine was working just fine for a couple of days and I even wrote a post about how pleased I was with it. Naturally it now does not work properly. The flyout no longer shows the person's avatar and blog site. Just colour and a few words and no info. I changed it from left to right hoping that would fix it but no shakes. My blog is http://nobodyimportant-jmb.blogspot.com. Any ideas? It worked just fine for a while. Thanks for any help you can give me. Email is nobodyimportantATshawDOTca

[Ian Kennedy]

@Nick - any specific on what is wrong?

@jmb - looks like it's working fine now. Glad you got it fixed.

[Ian Kennedy]

@Olivier - the widget configuration screen supports a single row in landscape, it just doesn't preview it for you. Use the following settings:

Style: Multiple Columns
Width: up to 1200 px wide
Rows: 1

That should do it. I just tested it on my site which you can see at:

http://everwas.com/shared/testing.html

[jmb]

Ian, thanks for checking my blog and the mybloglog problem. I had a copy of the code for the widget in the post which must have been causing an incompatibility problem with the widget in the sidebar. When I removed it from the post, after trying everything else it worked again.
I do love the new widget and the flyout especially.
Thank you. jmb