I thought I would continue my current theme of soapboxing – namely – the frustration of widgets. But perhaps this should be more correctly termed “the frustration of widgets on free blogs” with a subtitle of “all the stuff they don’t tell you”.
For some time now I have been reading about all the fabulous things that can be embedded into your blog to make it so much more appealing. I have trailled off into the internet in the search for more wondrous widgets that can be added to a blog to keep readers entertained (I guess this is in case your actual blog posts are so interminable that the reader has to be distracted somehow). Indeed I did find amazing and awe inspiring widgets of all descriptions. I chose some not too fanciful but nonetheless useless widgets to add to my blog sidebar just for the practice of doing it. Alas, all that happened was either nothing appeared, or, computerese was displayed (ie the html code), or, in the best cases, a symbol or snippet of the widget appeared along with a swathe of computerese. Needless to say the much anticipated widget failed to materialize and I sloped off the computer feeling thoroughly demoralised.
Today, however, I determined was the day to get the blogging widgets working. Once again I tried to embed a widget onto my sidebar and got the same result as usual. Undaunted I then started to trawl through the help pages of my blog host (ooh that sounds a bit vampirey doesn’t it!). Anyhoo, I came across a little message that basically said that if the widget didn’t display it was because either Javascript wasn’t enabled on my browser or Javascript wasn’t allowed to run on the website I was trying to embed into. After a bit of delving about I confirmed that Javascript WAS running on my browser (I just knew it!). And so this leads me to the inevitable conclusion that the problem lies with my blog host. Back to the help pages and finally I think I found the answer in the carefully hidden frequently asked questions section. Question number 10 addresses the problem of not being able to embed various media and widgets. The blame is laid at the feet of Sploggers who apparently just use free blogs to advertise etc etc. To make it difficult for sploggers free blogs do not allow this sort of embedding. Surprise, surprise, the advice was to upgrade to a pay to use blog.
Fair enough that the blog host wishes to prevent the abuses of providing a free blog, but at the same time it does make it rather difficult to complete the learning challenges that the blog host is promoting. Still, I have to admit that I have learned alot. I am fairly convinced that I am indeed able to complete the process of adding widgets even if they do not work on my blog. But most of all, I have had prior learning reinforced – there’s no such thing as a free lunch!
