Vista gadgets

Recently the CodePlex Team has updated the GUI of the whole site. Because of some minor changes in the layout the CodePlex Downloads Gadget stopped working and turned into:

Back in May this year Joel Oleson has put together a list of the top 100 SharePoint blogs. That top 100 is ordered by the Technorati Rating (Rank) of each blog participating. Joel is planning to do an update soon, so come on and improve the ranking of your blog so you can make it to the top 100 too.

But I have noticed that there is another page I visit daily: the visitors statistics of this blog. There are a couple of reasons why I'm interested in the numbers. First of all I'm writing about different subjects. While this blog is mostly SharePoint focused, once in a while I publish something else than that. I'm really curious how my audience receives that information and whether only people involved with SharePoint visit this blog. Secondly I both write and create tools. Tracking the number of visits and some other details helps me to determine what kind of content my audience - you like. Anyway, in order to gather that and some other data, I visit the stats page as provided by WordPress Stats.

It would definitely be great to make something useful of the badge. Post your ideas on where it should point to when clicked. The best idea will be added as the link of the MOSS 2007 Developer badge.

Just as every other author, I've been curious about the successfulness of my products. Unfortunately as only 10% of the whole community contributes I needed to found another way to find out what the community thinks of my tools. CodePlex provides some statistics about projects and releases among which the number of downloads for each particular release. As I've already mentioned: I have posted quite some tools, so regularly tracking the number of downloads for all them slowly became too time consuming. To automate the whole process I have decided to create a Vista Sidebar Gadget which would retrieve these numbers for me.