Ken Edwards's dashboard

Hi,

Please, please tell me there is a way to turn OFF the new Twitter feature. I am sorry to rain on your parade, I am sure you think it is a nice addition, but it does not load, period. Sorry but I am not a fan. I have a few reasons. Top on the list is functionality.

I have seen it load exactly once on my blog. The rest of the time it just sits there with the "loading" icon spinning. The right side (with the recent tweets) loads just fine, the left side that shows discussion of said page, nada.

I am a patient person, and I am a savvy web user. And I understand this is a beta product. But even I am not going to wait for that thing to load. I have waited for over five minutes at a time and never seen it load on most pages. When your Average Joe sees that spinning loading icon for any amount of time over a few seconds, he is going to think that something is wrong with the web site, and this greatly discourages use of the feature. In fact, it could kill it. If something on a site does not work, a user will just not use it, or leave the site.

It makes me want to take Twitter off of our toolbar all together because the new feature does not work and is not configurable. I really liked the old Twitter widget. I do like that you are now pulling in account information, though.

Also, to be quite honest, I do not see the value of displaying tweets about said article page. I assume it is taking so long to load (or not loading at all) because you are querying the Twitter API for instances of Article XYZ. Either the Twitter API is timing out, refusing your calls, or something, because that left part of the Twitter Dashboard just is not loading.

So, I really hope that you can turn OFF that left half of the Twitter Dashboard. And if not, I beg you to create the functionality to be able to do that, preferably from the Wibiya dashboard on your web site (which I see has no configurable options besides the Twitter account, like before).

Also, I much preferred the Twitter T icon, and not the full Twitter logo. Not just for brevity sake, but if you are working on adding more wizbang features in the future, said toolbar is going to become and unwieldy mess with very little screen real estate to work with. Is it possible to change that back to the T icon you had before?

Your toolbar has a very nice minimalist look to it, and I really like that. With that full Twitter logo there, it looses that. Also, because of the color and amount of color (bright blue in this case) the eye darts to it. This might sound like a good thing, but is not a desired effect. The content on the page should be the most important thing on the page. The Wibiya Toolbar should compliment the feature set of the site.

I have written you personally but will also post this to the Get Satisfaction site to see if others have the same option and/or performance issues that I do.

Ken

Hi,

I just installed the toolbar on bgviewsnetwork.com, and one blog, http://bgviewsnetwork.com/dev/ and have some initial thoughts.

I figured that the FB Community with FB Connect would ask me for my FB API key, as I am already using FB Connect on our site. I guess Wibiya does this so that there is less hassle to the user, but would be a nice option to allow to use my own FB App that I am using for the rest of the site.

We use a Google Custom Search Engine. It would be really nice to be able to plugin the query string for our Google CSE. Since your toolbar is already setup to use Google, would it be possible to include the option on the Toolbar Dashboard to add our own CSE ID and search URL?

As I already posted a problem about, I get an API Key error when I try and translate a page, though it does translate the page for me. Clicking OK on that error is not very friendly though.

As for the Recent Posts, I could do without the thumbnail at the left. Could this be a config on the toolbar dashboard to turn off thumbnails there, especially since not all posts have images?

Flickr photo set is nice, but it seems to add quite a lot of overhead to actually loading the toolbar, so I turned it off. I had to search Get Satisfaction because I was not putting in the correct info. Can you change the Dashboard to say Photo Set ID and not Flickr Album, because that is confusing. The 3D photo gallery looks nice though.

There seems to be a z-index issue with our Issuu widget in FF 3 Windows. This does not do this in FF 3 Mac or Safari.

http://twitpic.com/8rkjp

We use an Issuu widget to display our PDF of the newspaper. I do not know what the z-index is of that widget. But it seems to be higher than the Wibiya toolbar?

I have some questions/ideas:

Would it be possible to turn off the Random button?

Does this toolbar work with subdomains of the same domain name?

Is it possible to install this same toolbar on multiple sites, i.e. add multiple domains to our Wibiya profile?

My first impression of the Wibiya toolbar was on FIlmSchoolRejects. I am an Editor at Blogcritics and we have a few FSR writers at BC. But when I loaded the FSR site it was just crawling. Seriously slow. I did not know if it was the toolbar or the site. After installing it and fiddling with it on my Developer Blog it does not seem to add much overhead at all, which was my primary concern.

So far the toolbar looks like a great product.

Ken