Continued refinements to the XPCalReplace widget. There’s a new background, and the fonts are fully configurable now. The new background is due to the fact that I’ve figured out how to use msconfig to “downgrade” the Windows XP interface to something more old school and slightly less hideous.

Hot, fresh widgets: Bloglines Notify Widget for Konfabulator. Rather obviously, it displays the number of unread items in your Bloglines account. Clicking on the number will open your browser, pointed at your feeds panel. You can configure the amount of time to wait between updates (default 1 minute), and of course the widget needs to know your Bloglines login (email address) before it will do its magic.

I used a feed reader for about a week before I decided it wasn’t for me and went back to regular web-based Bloglines, but I missed having instant notification of new feed items. Bloglines does have their own notifier, but why not use a widget if you’re already running Konfabulator?

I’m beginning to see just how powerful and simple widgets can be. Total time from idea to completion was less than an hour, and most of that was spent deciding what the widget should look like.

My first Konfabulator widget: XPCalReplace. What it does is pretty well illustrated in the image at right. Once you place the widget on the screen correctly, it should blend in seamlessly with Win XP, replacing the windows clock in the system tray. You’ll first have to go into the widget preferences and set ‘window level’ to Topmost. If you notice it disappearing behind the standard windows clock at times, you also may have to go into the taskbar properties and uncheck “keep the taskbar on top of other windows.”

Pretty simple, really, but one thing I’ve learned is that all this is not as easy as it looks. I’m hoping to make improvements as I learn more. By the by, I mainly wrote this as a replacement for the handy utility TClockEx after upgrading to XP. TClockEx is much more configurable, and will run under XP, but doesn’t exactly blend in (can be read as: it’s dog-ugly).

Update 28 August: I fixed a fairly major bug regarding AM vs PM. Don’t know how I didn’t catch that before now. Oh, look over there! Shiny things!
29 August: Now comes loaded with several themes for XP and XP Media Center, as well as clear backgrounds if you want to use it somewhere else on your desktop. If you still don’t see something that matches the look of your taskbar, drop me a line.

I’ve posted about Mozilla/Firefox Quick Searches before, but here’s a new one: Flickr Tag Search. Bookmark that, give it the keyword ‘ft’, and type ft tag1 tag2 etc into your location bar to do a tag search for photos on Flickr. Searching for more than one tag only works when Flickr’s search servers are running correctly, though, which as of this writing they are not.

In other news:

• The Disable Target/OnClick for Downloads Greasemonkey script has been updated. It uses regex now instead a huge nested for loop. Translation: it runs faster.
• The Bloglines Continuous Updates script is more or less perfect now, so I listed it on the directory. Thanks to all the early adopters for their feedback and suggestions.
• The Enhanced Contacts’ Photos widget now accepts either a username or NSID. It’s just easier.