Came across a Bing search widget for blogs and websites. It’s a nice widget that can be easily added to any website or blog. You can get it here. Once it’s added, a nice search box gets added to your website/blog and viewers of your website can search the website. The search result is non-intrusive and appears in a nice pop up. You see the box on the right hand side of this blog. Since few weeks, I have started getting a feeling that Google is becoming the web’s Microsoft by trying to be a monopoly here – especially after the stupid drama it played against Bing. Hence I decided to add this Bing widget and let Bing also index my blog more (not that I create massive content here:)).
So, when I added this widget to the old layout, it became messy and I decided to change the layout of the blog. That’s when I was really impressed with the way blogger works. I just had opened Blogger in Firefox and my blog as an anonymous user in Chrome. As I choose a layout and start making modifications, re-arranging widgets, changing the color and things like that, I just keep refreshing in Chrome and I could see the changes in real time. I am pretty sure that blogger is running Google’s cloud and I am sure they will have replicated data to serve content faster to all users. With that kind of architecture and enabling on the fly changes to the blog’s layout – I was really impressed. Definitely a nice product and same with the way the widgets work too. It was pretty easy to add that Bing search widget – even a novice, non-techie user can do that.
Anyways, I set to try something and ended up changing the blog’s layout. So I hope to write more here…
Raghu's Ramblings 