For your information, I installed a toolbar in Smart Best Info weblog, it's toolbar located at the bottom of page. Some of you might have noticed it already and some have even asked me about it, where I got it, how I installed it or is it a plugin?
The first time I saw this toolbar in action was at This Blog and then saw it on some blogs/websites during my regular web surfing and blog hopping routines. Some of you might have also seen it on other blogs but don’t know what its called. The toolbar doesn’t have a name or credit source so I had to do some digging and researching before I finally found out what it was and where I could get it. The toolbar is called the Wibiya Toolbar.
What is Wibiya?
Wibiya enables blogs to integrate the most exciting services, applications and widgets of their choice into their blog through customized web-based toolbars.
Our platform offers a one-stop solution for integrating, managing and tracking third-party applications.
Currently we offer a fixed set of tools such as creating a blog community via facebook connect,enabling twitter alerts on your blog and enabling post navigation but there is a lot to wait for as we will be adding more and more application through time.
Wibiya Toolbar Features:
- Site search
- Translate
- Recent Posts
- Random Post
- Subscribe to RSS feed
- Share this post
- Facebook Community
- Facebook Fan Page
- Twitter Dashboard
- Notifications
- Photo Gallery
- Games
Wibiya is still in beta so you’ll need an invite to get in and if you don’t have one, you can request for an invite. I requested for an invite two weeks ago and got an invite two days after I sent my request.
Here’s how you configure and install the Wibiya Toolbar. When you get your invite, the first thing you need to do is login with the email address you used for requesting the invite and then provide the token or beta code sent to you by Wibiya. Next thing you need to do is to setup and configure your toolbar and you can do that via the Edit Toolbar section. (screenshot below)
Select the Applications that you want to be installed on your toolbar. When you’re done selecting the applications, click on Save & Make it Live and you’ll be brought to the next part which is the Edit Toolbar > Change Toolbar Theme section where you’ll be asked to select your toolbar’s theme (color scheme). (screenshot below)
After you’ve selected a theme, click again on the Save & Make it Live button. You’ll be brought to the Install Toolbar section. (screenshot below)
There are 4 options – Install on WordPress (widget), Install on Blogger (widget), Install on TypePad (code) and Install on websites or other blog platforms (code). Since I don’t use widgets, I chose the latter and inserted a line of code before the tag in my theme file.
Btw, there is a toolbar preview in the Change Toolbar Theme and Install Toolbar sections so you can see how your toolbar looks like before you install it.
Now that your Wibiya Toolbar is installed on your blog/website, you can tract some statistics like Live Notifications read, Posts Navigator clicks, Number of tweets read, Community Views, Website searches, Number of posts shared, Subscribed users to RSS feed, etc. from the Dashboard. (see screenshot below)
When Wibiya Toolbar is already installed and you decide to edit some parts of the toolbar, all you need to do is login and go to the Edit Toolbar section and proceed with changing your toolbar settings. If you make changes to your toolbar settings, you don’t have to reinstall the code, everytime you make and save changes, the changes are automatically applied to the toolbar on your blog/website. The Edit Toolbar > Account Details section is where you specify your Site Name, Site URL, Email Address and Site Language.
This is still in beta so there can still be some bugs and we can see some changes or additions later on. So far the only bug/flaw that I’ve seen is a z-index issue with my Amazon.com widget. (You’ll see what I mean by scrolling down the page until the toolbar crosses paths with the widget) Other than that, I haven’t had any issues or problems with the toolbar.
The Wibiya Toolbar is not obtrusive, very easy to install, both backend and frontend user interface are easy to understand and user-friendly. The Wibiya Toolbar not only adds more functionality to your blog or website but it also promotes user interaction and decreases bounce rate. Aside from that, the Wibiya Toolbar doesn’t slow down page load times and doesn’t use much of your web hosting resources because it is hosted externally by Wibiya and not from your blog/website. What I’d like the developers to add to the Wibiya Toolbar are more customization options, like being able to use my own Google Custom Search Engine for Site Search. It would also be nice to be able to have more control on some parts of the toolbar like how the Recent Posts are displayed.
If you want to see it live in action and try it out before installing it on your blog, check out the toolbar on the bottom of this page. One more thing, while you’re there please show some love by joining my Facebook Community and/or becoming a fan of Jaypee Online.
Anyone else using the Wibiya Toolbar on their blog or website? What are your thoughts or experience on using the Wibiya Toolbar? If you can add new features to it, what would it be? Please share your thoughts.
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