Some of you may recall a few months ago I created a wee site call Scribomatic, and, after a few people commented on how useful it was, it seems to have been promptly forgotten about.
Day after day, I kept checking the Google Analytics stats – 3 visitors… 4 visitors… 9 visitors… 2 visitors. And so it went.
It had been bugging me why more people didn’t use it. How could I improve the visibility of the site? Admittedly, I hadn’t really pushed it at all, despite using it regularly and constantly being impressed with how useful the search engine features were.
Then, Tuesday night, inspiration struck…
A couple of weeks ago Unk had given me the heads up about Blogrush, which I had thought was quite cool, even though the roll out of it over the past few weeks seems to have been a little shaky.
Then this week Stewart McKie mentioned to me about the Cliq widget. Again good stuff, but between Blogrush and Cliq, there were two extremes of the spectrum – the Blogrush widget with loads and loads of blogs, not all screenwriting related (though they have promised more categories, so that might change) and the Cliq one, with a select few.
What was needed, mused I, was something just for Screenwriters only. One that wouldn’t need a sign up (I can’t stand having to sign up to these things to use them). One that was already populated with the majority of screenwriting blogs out there preloaded…
Slowly the cogs turned in my brain.
What… if… I… created… a… Scribomatic… widget!
Gaaaaaah!
Then it would be on people’s web sites and they wouldn’t forget about the site, in fact they could search from the widget and what’s more they could see all the latest posts that the site was diligently storing away (for what purpose I hadn’t actually been sure, but it had).
180 odd Scribo-blogs, plus a further 70 or so Screenwriting related web sites.
It would do the Blogrush thing of giving visibility to everyone’s blogs and (hopefully) help drive traffic to them, but with the Google powered search added in, it would be invincible!!! Mwa ha ha!
So excited was I that I set to work immediately.
Now – four very late nights later, it lives!
Check it out either to the left of this post if you’re reading this on my web page, or on the main site at www.scribomatic.com.
To say I’m really pleased with it is an understatement. It’s feature rich, it seems to be stable (though please let me know if you find any ‘undocumented features’) and it’s, well, quite funky really.
However, I have found a teensie little drawback with it. Not the widget itself, but the concept – and this is where you guys come in.
Because all of the scribo-blogs I can find are already on there, it means that really, no one has to do anything about it. However, if you want more people to come to your site (and let’s be honest, if we didn’t, why on earth did we start blogging?), then we kind of all need to use it. The more web pages it appears on, the greater the visibility of our posts.
The fact that the search facility is on there as well is added incentive to give it a try.
And it’s as customisable as I could make it – with a splendid range of colour schemes, changeable size and various formatting options (I’ve even built a little configurator so you can play and get it looking just so before you use it!).
Please let me know what you think of it, and if you’ve used it in your web site/blog (as I don’t think I can actually track that – though GA might come up trumps again).
And now… sleep.
5 comments
BlogRush feed says:
October 20, 2007 at 12:15 am (UTC 1 )
You might be interested to know I found your blog entry here on my new “BlogRush” mashup… opinions from all around the Internet about whether or not BlogRush is worth installing on your blog. I programmed it to update on a minute-by-minute basis.
The opinions on my mashup might surprise you.
Check it out at: http://www.marketing-ideas.org/BlogRush-Opinions.php
FunJoel says:
November 1, 2007 at 6:08 pm (UTC 1 )
I’ll add as soon as I can. Thanks for doing this, man!
red right hand says:
November 2, 2007 at 9:30 pm (UTC 1 )
This widget of yours is at least nine and half times better than blogrush or any of the similar thingies.
Seriously, awesome.
Except for my not being in it. (jk)
MaryAn says:
November 5, 2007 at 11:21 pm (UTC 1 )
Okay. Let’s give her drive.
nic says:
November 12, 2007 at 5:18 pm (UTC 1 )
Widget snagged– thanks much!