Leopard Quick Tip: Use Web Clips to Keep Track of your RSS Readers
I’ve been using the awesome Dashalytics widget to pull my Google Analytics stats into my OS X Dashboard for a while now (the server-side analytics program Mint also has a cool widget you can install too). It’s wonderful being able to pull up a quick look at my site’s traffic without having to fire up a browser.
The latest version of OS X — Leopard — introduced web clips into Safari, which means you can now easily take a snapshot of any portion of a web site and create your own widget from it.
To create a web clip, just click on the scissors icon in Safari and then select the portion of the web site you want to view and click the Add button.
One stat I’ve been paying close attention to lately is the number of RSS readers on my blog - and Safari’s web clips let me do this very easily. I have Feedburner’s Feedcount displayed on my blog in the upper right-hand corner of this blog, so I just created a web clip of that section of my site to show on my dashboard.
Any other cool uses for web clips you’ve discovered?
Bonus Tip: You can style your widget with 6 pre-determined themes - just click the ‘i’ icon on the lower right corner of the widget.
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Michael Price | Nov 1, 2007 | Reply
I love this feature, I am also finding Spaces to be a great new feature of the OS. What else have you found about Leopard that you like or hate?
Metrowest MA Real Estate | Nov 1, 2007 | Reply
Joel - That is really cool. I also use the feedburner site myself but have only had it for a few weeks. I have a question I am hoping you know the answer to. One of the settings for the tracking feature of feedburner allows you to see how many people have subscribed as you are showing on your blog. I was worried, as it made mention that this could affect your search engine position. I am going to assume that maybe I don’t need to worry about that as you don’t seem to have any problems with it?
Incredible Agent | Nov 1, 2007 | Reply
I don’t have Leopard yet, but IF(big if) you had a web page that saved all your home search criteria and showed you all the new homes available you could easily take a clip of that and it would update your dashboard with new home listings. You could also take a web clip of your homes Zestimate if you wanted to keep track of it.
Come to think of it, this would be a very helpful feature with any stats you want to keep an eye on, not just RSS subscribers. Try not to clutter up your dashboard with a bunch of junk widgets though.
Galen | Nov 1, 2007 | Reply
You can do that on Estately, Incredible Agent - I’ll try to do a post on it next week.