I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not going to win any awards for blogging, and although I currently write on four different blogs, I’ve only posted about 200 times in the last year or so. There are probably different reasons and/or excuses why I don’t post that often, but I’m putting forth a new effort to change that.
Like many people, I do well with rewards and incentives, so I went ahead and ordered myself a little Dell Mini earlier this month to make it easier to blog any time, any where. So to prepare for it’s arrival (since there are severe delays from Dell), I went ahead and created this fun little Blog Calendar widget to supplement the Blogger section at kris.nelson and my combined RSS feed. It’s a little motivation to keep me online and contributing to the Blogosphere on a more regular basis.
What it Does
It really isn’t that big of a deal, but I had fun putting it together. It’s just another little calendar control rendered with JavaScript like the 11,000,000 others out there, but it showcases days of a given month that I have posted on one of my blogs. You can see when I’ve been a happy little blogger, like back in April when I was in Maui, and when I’ve just been asleep at the wheel like this past July when I seemed to have taken the entire month off.
The days with at least one post are highlighted and when clicked, the posts from that day are displayed. And it all is done with a little flashy animation created with script.aculo.us. There are still a few quirks that I need to track down and work out, but it was working enough to roll it out and, of course, blog about it. There are a few interesting things going on behind the scenes to aggregate all the archive feeds from each blog and querying against them, but I’ll save that for another time.
To view it in action, just go to http://kris-nelson.com and navigate to the “Blogger” section from the menu. Once it pops up happily in the upper left hand corner, you can use it to travel back in time and view my previous posts (or lack there of), all the way back to my first post (I really need to update that blog template).
In the coming weeks, I’m thinking of putting this on a bigger stage instead of just a small little widget. But for now, I’ve been playing around with my newest camera and trying to be a regular contributor to my photos on Flickr as well. Not enough hours in the day, I tell ya.
Anyway, let me know what you think of the new blog calendar.
