Digsby widget for BlogEngine
I've got email from user having issues with embedding HTML snippet into BlogEngine's page. Not really sure what was wrong with that tag, because I have never get to test it. Why? Because it is sometimes easier to add simple extension or widget than to deal with row HTML when it comes to BlogEngine. Seriously, it took me way under half an hour following steps in my own simple widget tutorial to put this together, and this is including time spent opening Disby account.
If you want to add instant messaging functionality to your blog, go to Digsby website, open account (should take couple minutes top) and customize widget they create for you on-the-fly. Important part is taking a widget’s key (should look something like “c=9didpahwu0cup3v4” in the generated snippet), you’ll need it when setting up widget in the BlogEngine.
Once it is completed, download BlogEngine’s widget from the link at the bottom of this post and move it to the “widgets” directory in your site. From there, add it to the widget zone as any other widget, set mentioned earlier key, width and height. You should get result as seen in the picture on the left when you load the page. From now on visitors can see your IM status and can chat/twit with you directly whenever you online and logged into Digsby desktop client (you’ll need to download it from their site separately). I’m not into social craziness kind of stuff but if I were, that would seem like pretty good option to me. The point is, if you are using BlogEngine and not writing extensions/widgets, you really should start doing it. It is easy and you can get lots of functionality almost for free. Give it a try.
