The London Restaurant Blog Widget, Again

Back in July, I told you all about my London Restaurant Blog Search Widget. It searches across multiple London restaurant blogs to bring you all the reviews from all the London restaurant blogs, all in one place. I got the idea from ueber-blogger Elise at SimplyRecipes during BlogHer.

 

Back when I first set it up, Widgetbox didn’t give me many details about how many times it’s been installed, who’s installed it, how many times people have searched using it, or anything really.

 

But now they do! So I thought I’d share some stats with you and give a shout out to all the folks who took the time to set the widget up on their London blogs.

 

Since I launched the London Restaurant Blog Search widget in July, it’s been viewed 161,981 times. Yesterday alone, it was viewed 1089 times. It’s been installed on 24 sites.

 

Here are the top 10 referrers…
Food Stories: You know I can’t cook. But I read Helen’s blog and wish I could.
Cheese & Biscuits: Thank goodness Cheese of the Month is back!
Ripe London: Jess, we need to have dinner.
Wine Culture: He’s moved domains and he’s taken down the widget. But I’ll still give him some link love.
Gourmet Chick: Her dining exploits rival the best of us.
Game Well & Truly Over: Sadly seems to have removed the widget.
LoveLondon: Updated about twice a month.
Trivial Pursuits: Hasn’t been updated since September which is a shame, because she does good content.
Minding the Gap: Sadly, they moved back to the U.S. last month.
Southeast London Foodie: A nicely done restaurant blog that sadly hasn’t been updated since September.

 

One of the things I was most impressed with, however, is that I can see that a lot of people have added the widget to iGoogle. If you haven’t played around with iGoogle yet, it lets you set up your own personalized home page and you can add the London Restaurant Blog Search to your home page.

 

Anyhow, because it’s the end of the year, I’m out of content, and I just discovered the Widgetbox stats, I thought I’d bring the widget to your attention again. If you’ve blogged about London restaurants and would like to be included, please let me know. Previously, I was saying that I would only include blogs that were mostly restaurant reviews, but I’m going to relax that requirement. So if you’re a cooking/recipe blogger who does the odd London restaurant review, I’ll add you too. Just leave a message in the comments.

 

Note that some blogs don’t accept Javascript so the widget can be hard to install. On Typepad, I’ve been able to easily install the widget into my sidebar, just by using the Typepad option on Widgetbox. When I’m posting the widget in the body of a post, I have the most luck if I switch to “Edit HTML” and then drop the code directly into the HTML page and then save. Don’t switch back to Rich Text for this post, or you’ll lose the widget. Not sure why, but that’s how it works for me.