Some of you may have noticed some changes that were put into production yesterday.  We have added a  new "countdown" widget which you can use to keep readers of your blog, startpage or social network aware of the time left until a certain event takes place (birthday, party, product launch, etc.).  Below we have a countdown showing the amount of time until the South by South West Web Awards ceremony kicks off on March 11th at 7:00pm - wish us luck in bringing home the "Technical Achievement" award.

In addition, we've fixed a number of items.  The following is a shout out to those of you who have helped us find and resolve these issues:

• One of our featured members, mjmj found an issue with having recently added feeds disappear as additional content is added to the page - this has been resolved.
• mjmj also pointed out an issue with the public pages widget being a bit of a performance hog - we've taken care of that now.
• Another one of our featured members, Lawz, pointed out that we removed the URL link when locking the Fav Tabs widget.  We've corrected this issue.
• We have a number of issues with the calendar widget.  It seems that we weren't displaying repeating events that were daily or monthly, although we were supporting this for weekly events - definitely weird.  Thanks to jive for pointing this out.  Thanks also goes out to dberthia for pointing out that we didn't auto convert from webcal:// to http:// (where possible) and that our support for Basecamp ICS files was somewhat limited.  All of these issues have been addressed.
• acidheat informed us of an issue with the notepad widget, where the scrollbars didn't appear, even when necessary.  We found the same issue existed in our text editor widget as well, and we have corrected both widgets.
• senseBOP and some other members have helped us track down an issue where some feeds marked as read would end up being unread again, they next time they were viewed.  This should now be fixed.
• There was a weird problem found by pintu, where the MP3 player occasionally just displayed the "MP3" instead of the name of the current track.  We think that this is now resolved.
• Robin discovered that some of our widgets didn't work too well when accessed with the Opera browser on the Windows platform.  We've been able to address this issue.

Finally, at the request of many of our members (Hamsternator, dberthia, stevepender), we've added the ability to link through to the root level blog when using the RSS widget.  All you have to do is click on the icon in the upper left hand side of the widget to open up the specific blog.

For those of you who haven't begun to build up your profile, what are you waiting for? :)  Go ahead and upload a thumbnail picture, add a description, some interests and publish some pages.  As you can see, we want to thank our members for helping us find and resolve issues with the system - and we want to link to your profiles!

As always, please provide your comments/thoughts/suggestions in our forums and directly in the community area of the site.  Thanks for your continued support!