That's right, the feature list just had triplets!

1. Member of the Month. With this widget placed on any of your site's pages, members can vote on other members that they feel deserve being called the member of the month (or called out, depending on your guild's particular type of humor). It also allows people to see who's getting the votes for the current month, but doesn't show them from whom the votes are coming. That would lead to harassment, bullying, and eventually, blood in the streets.
2. Random Member. Operates a bit like the Member of the Month, only completely different. There's no voting involved. The person displayed is completely arbitrary. Computer-selected. It does allow the entry of a short bio that is specifically between your members and your site, and it's displayed along with them.
3. External Voice Server. Alright, not really a feature so much as a patch to help with the confusion that resulted from us offering Ventrilo server hosting. If you have your Ventrilo (or other) voice server hosted by someone else, you'll probably want to use this widget to paste in any "Server Status" scripts they provide you, to display who's currently logged in and all that. It also gets around that problem you used to have with scripts being too long, by replacing the old way they were stored with a bigger field in the database.

To add any of these widgets to a page on your site, head to the Control Panel, click Pages and Content (Widgets), pick a page, and then click the Add Widget tab.

It seems you forgot to include the the closing tag for the scripttag.

As for the rendering problem, that's sadly the nature of browsers and javascript, the browser rendering halts while javascript is parsed (which it is as soon as it is encountered in the source). This is the reason why javascript should _always_ be located at the bottom of the html files.

You could probably fix your case by wrapping your script in an iframe.

Good that it worked for you and you found the font.

Yeah, there are some tricks to make javascript load asynchronously, and they make a very measurable difference on javascript-heavy pages. And still some of the big sites don't use it... Since more and more of the functionality lies in javascript this becomes very important, and sadly the impact of javascript is poorly understood, and it's not only the parsing and execution time that matters, net round-trips and wait times make a big difference as well, since the browser is blocking during the whole retrieval/parsing. One good side effect of refactoring your code to take all this into account is that it ends up a lot better, faster and less buggy than before.

I would really like it if GP could start loading the javascript asynchronously, it would make the site a lot snappier.

There are actually quite a lot of info about this on the web. One of the "experts" on the area is Steve Souders, he writes quite a lot and most of it is available online http://stevesouders.com/