Dipping into the Blogpond

Today I read an article on Techcrunch about a website called Conduit which allows users to create customised downloadable toolbars for their websites. This is something that I’ve wanted to do for quite some time for dLook, so I was quite excited to have a look.

The process per se, is really simple for even a programming ignoramus like me. I had the basic dlook toolbar set up in minutes. I then spent quite a while customising the buttons to add our top searches to the toolbar. The only negative was that they were obviously experiencing major problems with their server, so I kept losing my changes.

I finally got the toolbar how I wanted it & then thought I’d give it a road test. I was unable to download the Firefox version – it kept telling me that the page was unavailable. So I thought I’d try the IE version (at 774kb) – which, according to Conduit “Installs in seconds”. Unfortunately, the download stalled at 7% the first time, 19% the second time, 26% the third time, and yeah! Success the 4^th time in 13 seconds!

Unfortunately, the “tell a friend” function doesn’t appear to work, but apart from that, I’m quite happy with the finished result.

Update 12/1/07: I ended up having to duplicate the toolbar & rename it for Firefox, which is a bit of a shame as now we have two separate download spots. The Firefox version is here.

Update 14/1/07: It seems the issue is now fixed and the original toolbar can now be installed on Firefox – yeah!