As a blogger, I want to get my blog out to the world. So I joined many social network sites like MyBlogLog.com, BlogCatalog.com and BumpZee.com, which provide a blog widget for blogger to plug-in to their site. It’s interesting to see who was also on my site. I think the original purpose is for the blogger owner and the viewers to see who else are viewing the page and potentially checking out those viewers as well. At least, that is what I do.

Blog Widget

However, things are getting ugly ….

For the past few months, I was using it and happy with it. I sometimes see the same face on all three widgets, so I checked them out. I also see some face showing up everyday, whom I believe are my royal readers. I appreciate their visit. Two weeks ago, I start a new discussion on BlogCatalog.com. I will visit your site, if I see your face on my site. It was quite success. I got pretty good traffic and I stumbled, bookmarked, dugg and tab browsing them for days.

I am happy what the results turn out. I meet a lot of friends and got a lot of traffic from them. That is good. Just for the past few days, I find my face appear on some of the sites that I was not suppose to be on. I stumble through pages and left in just a second. After that I find some new faces on my site. I went to check them out and find those as some spam sites or so-called “Doorway” sites, which have whole bunch spayware cookies installed. I don’t want my face on those sites.

So what are the problems with these widget?

  1. Sometime, it is so slow to load the widget. It takes a lot of longer to load the page, which is annoying to my readers. They walk away.
  2. Some people don’t like to be seen on the other sites.
  3. Some people is spying on who you are, where you are from and so on.
  4. I just want to know who were on my site. I don’t want my viewer to see who else were on my sites. I find a lot of SEO sites, they don’t installed the widget. Is that for competition reasons? I don’t know.

So. Should I stop using those nice widgets? Definitely Not. So can I hide it? Yes.

Basically, I create a new HTML page that contains only those widgets available to myself. So no one else sees it. The above picture shows three widgets in one page. So I am the only know where the page is.

You might be asking question. “How do the widget knows who is on your site, if you hide it?”

First of all, the HTML page has to be on the same site as your blog. In other words, under the same domain. Well. If you are using Blogger.com, try put the widget somewhere on a site that you can access. There is an ID associated with your blog, so you should still be able to see the widget even they are on different sites. I have not test it.

For MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, you will have to install a Javascript to track who is on your site. The widget itself doesn’t really do so.

For MyBlogLog, you will need to get the Track script under your blog profile page below your Widget script.

For BlogCatalog, you will need to installed the “Blog Catalog Button” under your profile.

For BumpZee, you will need to tweak your widget. BumpZee’s widget is different than the above two. It shows how many viewer online, the faces, the popular post and the state for the blog owner. So we have to hide it.

This is how-to.

Go to “Got Widgets” section and “Create a Javascript Widget”.

Customize everything to match your blog’s background color. In my case, I change the every color to white (FFFFFF).

  1. Leave Header Text alone
  2. Change widget width to 1. You can’t set it to 0.
  3. Check No on “Show # viewers online now”
  4. Set Max number of visitors to 1. You can’t set it to 0.
  5. Set number of visitor columns to 2, You can’t set it to 0.
  6. Set number of top blog post to “Don’t show” or to 5. This is where you as owner will see the most popular posts.
  7. Set number of top BumpZee entries to “Don’t Show”
  8. Preview and generate the code
  9. Copy the code to your blog sidebar

It looks like this.

20070619_blogwidget_01

Now we need to tweak the script, because it will still show 2 faces with white background. We need to get rid of the faces. In other words, we need to reset #2, #4 and #5

Paste your script and look for the following query string parameter in your script and change to the following value accordingly.

  1. entries=0
  2. width=1
  3. visitors=0
  4. headtxt=
  5. cols=0
  6. oln=0
  7. pop=0

Save it. Now you have a clean page without the widget. You will only see the state, because your are the blog owner.

Now, I am the only one know where the HTML file is located. So I can just open the file in my browser and view who were on my site.

If you ever link the HTML page from your blog, you need to do the following to avoid search engine crawler to find it. You simply add the following meta tag into your HTML file.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow, noarchive” />
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex, nofollow, noarchive” />

If you think the post helps you, please digg, stumble, trackback, pingback. Thanks!

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