Since February 2007 I have been a member of MyBlogLog, a Web service that offers simplistic user tracking. I had found MyBlogLog through one of the widgets posted on several websites, among them Stephanie Booth’s blog.

MyBlogLog looks a little bit 1999 design wise, and it doesn’t really offer substantially useful content. And it only works if you are a member too, otherwise it won’t track your visit. It also doesn’t provide the kind of data you get with Google Analytics, which is entirely for free. MyBlogLog reminds you to upgrade to a pay account in a rather pushy way, but given the basic functionality I like, I don’t plan to upgrade any time soon.

There is one big drawback though, which MyBlogLog has in common with a number of so called Web 2.0 services out there. We have 2007, so mentioning Web 2.0 in one sentence, I would assume that this includes a Web design that is following Web Standards. It’s not like CSS 2 was invented last week and we are first adopters of CSS based layouts.

Yet, MyBlogLog seems to think we need a nasty table as a widget. That alone wouldn’t make it bad, if there was a good way to replace the table and use XHTML and CSS make a useful and clean snippet of code. A lot of people are doing this all the time with widgets, like Flickr for an example. The Flickr bar you see on top of Theory applies the JavaScript from Flickr, sans any table or formatting, with a new set of CSS styling from my style sheet. Veerle has posted a good guide on her blog.

After spending the good half of one morning with trying to use MyBlogLog’s nasty widget code, I decided to pull the plug. No widget from MyBlogLog on my blog. I can’t have such a clunky 1999 styled box destroying the look and feel of the core experience, and if MyBlogLog doesn’t let me produce a simple, clean code snippet without a table and horrible styling, I won’t deal with their annoying code.

MyBlogLog, if you are reading this: Once you cleaned up your widget code crap, give me a call.