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FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

On Fundraising Widgets

Hi, Mister Campaign Fundraiser Technician?

Yes, you. I don’t care if you work in a campaign, or just sell your services to campaigns. I’m talking to you.

We at RedState.com do enjoy asking our readers to give money to candidates. When a good Republican needs help, we want to find that help. And one thing you guys have already figured out is that nifty website widgets draw attention and can fire up donors.

So please, when you make those widgets, design them to be flexible. Help us help you by making them resizeable, or at least available in a variety of sizes. Don’t make them a javascript which embeds unknown HTML and runs unknown code on our site, possibly conflicting with other code or even our ads, forcing us to take down the widget and helping nobody.

A Flash widget is best. Make it as easy on us to embed your widgets as Youtube makes it to embed their videos. With those, we can paste in the code, change the size if we want, and ship it. The easier and more reliable that process is, and the more compatible your widget is, the more likely it is we’ll be able to drive money to your candidate or client.

And I’m sure it’s not just us who has these problems. So by helping us, you’ll help others make your widgets work, too.

Thank you.

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COMMENTS

  • blooch

    I’m as relieved as you are irritated, Neil. Thanks for the “500 error” explanation;)

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    When the Sanford thing hit, bam.

    When the Franken thing hit, bam.

  • blooch

    It does seem like “Recent Comments” has been cycling like a slot machine wheel recently.

  • TNJim

    When I clicked on some diary headlines after the page loaded for that diary some of the more recent comments I saw in the comments table on the previous page were missing. In other words, a comment title on the previous page that was about 3rd or 4th from the top would be at the top on the new page, with the 3 or 4 newer ones missing. Sometimes a reload would bring them back, sometimes not. The problem would usually resolve itself over a short period of time

  • Brian Hibbert

    It might help to have some examples….

  • http://briansimpson.wordpress.com Brian Simpson

    Nothing worse than loading up my favorite website only to have the page not load properly because of some poorly written code by an outside source.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    Give me something that’s a Flash embed into the site, like a Youtube video. Ideally with the size adj ustment that Youtube embeds have.

    I’m told that iContribute does widgets like this.

    A black box <script> embed is no good to us. Typically not configurable and if it conflicts with our other scripts we have to remove it. Or if it breaks our layout we have to remove it, too.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    …because I don’t want to single out anybody on our side :-)

  • George Claghorn

    Slatecard had a pretty nice widget setup that worked well. They’ve taken the site down, but it’s supposed to be back up sometime this summer.

  • George Claghorn

    …if Slatecard would let you embed a widget for an individual candidate.

  • Brian Hibbert

    It’s just sometimes helpful to have both good and bad examples. Thanks for the pointer to the good widget. I don’t know if I’ll be working on any campaign web sites, but if I do, I’ll use something like that one.

    I hope you at least emailed the site administrators for the bad widgets.

  • peg_c

    My time is short and some days I have to give up. :-) I hope this gets fixed…

  • peg_c

    n/t

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens
  • asleep06

    Thanks for working the infrastructure.

  • mom2oneson

    Everyone give Neil lots of big hugs in Atlanta!!!!

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    The fact that we’ve had a mere two bursts of 500s lately, and that’s enough to get people to be commenting about all these problems, I take that as a good sign.

    It means the site’s running so well you guys have higher expectations now. We’ve raised the bar.