How to make good use of your past Posts? Use MineKey!

Information overload is a big issue. Take this blog for instance, we have about 140 posts on this blog. Many of these posts don't lose their relevance with time, but they get hidden in the vastness of the web. This is a challenging situation for any blog publisher. How do you as a publisher ensure that readers of your blog, find more posts from your blog or other sources according to their interest? One product which might help you address this issue is the Minekey widget. In the following post, I will go through the user experience of Minekey.

The Website is clear of all clutter normally associated with widget sites and has good navigation. Using the widget or seeing any related statistics requires one to login. The Signup screen is pretty simple requiring minimum details. Providing more details like Gender, Date of Birth is optional and can be done at a later time. The login name is by using an email address, saves us the trouble of remembering one more login name. It would be great if they can integrate with OpenID.
A few glitches while entering the Date of Birth are
i) The Date field is only one digit wide, hence it's two digits dates are not visible.

ii) The minimum year is 1940. (Oh! oh! I am 67 and should not blog!!)


Next comes, the most important, the Widget itself. Creating the widget is pretty straight forward and intuitive. One excellent thing, I found is the ability to change the size of the widget easily. Not many widgets give this feature.Good job here. But again here it's not without blemishes.
i) There is label with "1" in it(see the figure). What is the purpose?

ii) Once you click on add widget, a transparent overlay comes up. Check for your self the two screens below and you will know what I am talking about.












iii) The widget colors itself is a problem, the cheerful theme widgets don't come in a wide range of choices. In the Fully Customizable mode, I cannot customize the border styles. I don't see a reason for not providing a fully customizable widget.












Clicking on My Reports takes you to details of the statistics about your reports. A good looking simple functioning UI greets you. I am happy with the reports being available for today, yesterday, Last 7 days, Last Month and overall. Ability to check stats over a date range would be nice to have. However, what I as a publisher would like to see, is more details on "Articles Clicked Through". Currently it is just statistics except under the Today and yesterday mode. Ability to see these statistics will give me more idea on the interests of my users. I don't see why this is not being done currently.

Another interesting feature is the My History. This is shows me the list of all the articles I clicked on various Minekey widgets. I can also share this history with others. A good thing when you are trying to build a community around your widget. Except for this, I don't see any other use for this. Also, I see a bunch of bananas next to some items, what do they mean? I have no clue.


To summarize, I feel this is an excellent tool in the hands of publishers. However, what bothers me (the reason you see it at the bottom of my blog and not on the top side bar) is the limited ability to customize the widget. The experience using the site is good, a clean and and simple interaction across.

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