Site Features

Since I'm sort of a nerdy computer programmer type who does web and Internet-related technical stuff for a living, I sometimes like to tinker with stuff. This includes adding lots of crazy little features and widgets to this blog. Here are the ones that I've added, in case anyone is interested in reading about them. Feedback requested.

First off, you probably notice that the blog is implemented using Blogger. Really I didn't bother to compare with other blogging services but I'm pretty happy with Blogger.

This is a little button from addtihs.com that makes it a little easier to subscribe to the blog's RSS feed.

The feed is also processed by Feedburner which does some interesting things like collecting feed stats and performing some modifications to the feed. Feedburner also allows me to create this little animated GIF and collect clickthrough stats on it:


Also related to RSS, there are actually 3 RSS feeds here. The first is the actual blog RSS feed, the second is the Newsroll (which is also a widget over on the left), and the third is the Booklist.

The Newsroll is implemented using a special shared tag in Google Reader; basiclaly anything I tag as "politicalbuddhism" will show up in the newsroll. I try to keep this limited rather than flooded with articles about Tibet or something that are already all over the news.

The Booklist is implemneted using the "My Library" feature of Google Books. Any books that I tag as "politicalbuddhism" will show up in this book list RSS feed. So this allows people to keep track of books I come across that seem relevant.

Also from addtihs.com is this bookmark button at the bottom of each post that makes it easier to bookmark an individual post using a variety of bookmark services. Stole this idea from Buddhist News Digest.

This blog is indexed by Technorati (when Technorati is actually working properly, which is not all the time) and if you'd like to help promote the blog a little bit, please add it to your favorites using this button.

Page translation is supplied by the Google Translate Gadget. (I stole this idea from Forest Wisdom.)

Recent Comments are shown in a widget over on the left. I think this is kind of helpful to show what people are talking about recently without having to pick through the whole site.

The Popular Posts widget over on the left gives you some sense of what people have found most interesting based on the number of comments.

This blog participates in a few directories like Webring, Blog Catalog, and Blogflux.

According to Blogflux Top Sites, my blog is actually not at the bottom of the list! Amazing! This is at least somewhat confidence-inspiring.

This little thing is kind of cool. Click that button to see visitors to the site in the last day plotted on Google Maps.

Finally, the RSS newsfeed widget from SpringWidgets is kind of cool. I think I'll use it whenever I tell someone about a new blog or other news source so they can get an idea of what it's like. Example:



If you'd like to embed a widget like this for the Political Buddhism blog, you can do so by going here. You can create a widget like this for any one or more RSS feeds that you want by going here.

Well anyway, that ought to be enough dukkha for one blog, for now.